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watch The Last Frame

Will Vincent

Will Vincent

I've gotten the go ahead to get this up online since the first round of judging is overwith..

This was the entry into the National Film Challenge this year of the team I helped out on.. I was tasked with a fair amount of rotoscoping, and had about 16 hours within which to get it done.. it's not perfect, but it works.. I'm responsible for all the black & white bits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKkrw5oFNC0

I believe the required elements were:

Dialogue: "Darn the luck"
Prop: a net
Character: Miss Watkins, Chiropractor

The genre is romance.


UPDATE: I've also put this on vimeo, so you can watch it in a bit higher quality here: http://vimeo.com/2480307
 
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Hey good job with that Will.

I have a question.

I have digital footage that's currently in B&W. There are some items in different scenes that I've been thinking of making in color, like a backpack or a little piece of gum wrapper. How do I go about this? Is this considered rotoscoping?
 
It would be significantly more work to colorize black and white footage than to selectively desaturate portions of color footage. It can be done of course, and yes it would involve some rotoscoping, but getting the color to look realistic would be challenging.
 
thediceman said:
Good work!

Being an AE user I appreciate how much work went into it. Nice effect!
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Thanks. :) It's pretty straightforward... I animated the mask by hand, one frame at a time in most cases, and then the black & white layer has a film scratches effect applied, it's desaturated (obviously) and I'm also using the trapcode shine plugin for the glow around her, then there is a wiggle on the intensity of the shine and brightness of the layer so that she flickers and shimmers as if being projected there.

And for those who may wonder, no the girl was NOT shot on a green screen, she's in all of the shots she appears in.
 
Will,
Awesome job with Rotoscoping, probably the most tedious task in the FX world, it's not hard, just very tedious, but it can be challenging to move the mask points frame by frame to accurately outline the character's positions. I've seen a tutorial on Autotracing but I think that only works on an Alpha Channel, have you used the Auto Trace feature, and if so, does it work well for you?
 
Never used autotracing, no.. the closest I've ever used was a feature that was built in to the old Avid Elastic Reality morphing program, it had a semi-intelligent spline that would follow contours based on luminance levels I think.. it was cool, but didn't work all the time. Elastic Reality was a really cool program, don't think it's around anymore though.. kind of a shame really.
 
Someone would make a ton of money if they could develop a smart program that autotraces within certain boundaries set by the editor. Oh well, until then, it's point by point, frame by frame :) BTW, just for my own info and trying to gauge my own prices, would you mind telling me how much you would have charged for this if it were a paying customer instead of the team you were on? If you don't feel comfortable I understand, I'm just trying to figure out what Pros like you charge.
 
EvsFX08 said:
Someone would make a ton of money if they could develop a smart program that autotraces within certain boundaries set by the editor. Oh well, until then, it's point by point, frame by frame :) BTW, just for my own info and trying to gauge my own prices, would you mind telling me how much you would have charged for this if it were a paying customer instead of the team you were on? If you don't feel comfortable I understand, I'm just trying to figure out what Pros like you charge.
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I'm not certain, but most likely it would have been a standard hourly fee.. I don't have any kind of set rates established at the moment.. ;)
 
Will Vincent said:
I don't have any kind of set rates established at the moment.. ;)
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Hmmm, interesting not having a set rate. I have seen one guy who charges $90 an hour. I'd never have any business if I charged that for the area I'm living in, but is that rate really a good average for most areas? If so, I need to move!
 
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I don't have enough business at the moment to have gotten around to having set rates yet.. I'm looking to change that within the next year as I focus a bit more on what I WANT to do, rather than the current day job I have to do to pay the bills.. ;)
 
I just heard a rate of $.50 / frame from a guy online who does FX work for a living... so 1k frames = $500 for him. which is about 41 seconds @ 24fps and 33s @ 30fps
 
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Wow. Interesting story. I got goose bumps toward the end. That's not easy with me. Great job on the project. I liked the use of B&W, and your FX worked well. It wasn't distracting.

Although the gratuitous net shot made me wonder, but I guess that was because of the requirement for the project. And it sounds like you had some challenges with sound levels.
 
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Will Vincent said:
At that rate this job would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 :)
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That would have been worth the roto time :yes:

The B/W turned out better on screen than I saw it in my head (edges were a little wide, but I'd chalk that up to the compressed timeframe you had for the project).
 
VPTurner said:
Wow. Interesting story. I got goose bumps toward the end. That's not easy with me. Great job on the project. I liked the use of B&W, and your FX worked well. It wasn't distracting.

Although the gratuitous net shot made me wonder, but I guess that was because of the requirement for the project. And it sounds like you had some challenges with sound levels.
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Yeah, there's a few cuts that I don't personally like, that net shot is one of them.. to me it looks like it's there by mistake. I wasn't able to be on set for the actual shoot, but there probably wasn't really room for me anyway given the extremely tight quarters they were shooting in.
 
knightly said:
That would have been worth the roto time :yes:

The B/W turned out better on screen than I saw it in my head (edges were a little wide, but I'd chalk that up to the compressed timeframe you had for the project).
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Well, yes that and she's supposed to be like a ghostly projected image, so imperfect edges were somewhat intentional..
 
Will Vincent said:
I don't have enough business at the moment to have gotten around to having set rates yet.. I'm looking to change that within the next year as I focus a bit more on what I WANT to do, rather than the current day job I have to do to pay the bills.. ;)
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I completely understand, I have the military as a day job which pays the bills. I'm hoping to be a video editor/VFX artist full time when I retire in a few years, so I'm just trying to get an average on what I should charge.

I'm too lazy to figure out the .50/frame deal. Right now, I'm charging about $40-50 an hour, and it seems reasonable for what people are asking me to do, nothing to challenging yet, but the hourly rate is not enough for a full time job, fortunately, I'll have a military pension to pay the bills when I retire, and can focus on doing what I love to do. :) Business isn't bad for me right now, it's just finding the time to do everyone's projects.
 
knightly said:
I just heard a rate of $.50 / frame from a guy online who does FX work for a living... so 1k frames = $500 for him. which is about 41 seconds @ 24fps and 33s @ 30fps
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That's just too much math involved for me. Interesting info though, I never would have guessed someone charges per frame. But I think I'll stick with an hourly rate for simplicity reasons :)
 
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