Just a quick update. Things are gradually starting to dance around the house…

https://vimeo.com/85083867

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/85083867″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/85083867″>Comp 1 3</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

I ended the last blog with “simple?..” I can now attest that the next stage of the process is in fact not “simple”.

Cutting…

So when I finished the last blog I was in the midst of cutting out hundreds of tiny figures to prepare for shooting a stop frame animation of them. After setting up a little scene for the figures to dance in. I realized I had two major problems to contend with. Firstly matching the camera angles and movement in the source footage seemed to be nearly impossible, and secondly replacing the cut-outs  physically  in the space with the accuracy needed also seemed to be nearly impossible. To cut a long story short, I developed several mounts and spent ages trying to measure and recreate camera movement all to pretty poor effect.

 Here is a snippet of the resulting footage.

https://vimeo.com/84604458

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/84604458″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p>Untitled from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Here the accuracy needed to make it work was just not possible for me to achieve. In addition to that, the amount of time it took and the fact I’m very reliant on natural lighting, meant that throughout the shooting the lighting changed to drastically. This would have been setting me and the computer up for a colour grading breakdown (mental) further down the line.

I was despondent.  For several hours I just sat looking at all my hard cutting-out work, kind of pretty and interesting but now redundant never to be brought to life by the magic of stop motion.

Beautifully Despondent

But I didn’t give up.

It was clear that, not only was my current work flow going to take me the best part of spring to realize, but that also it wouldn’t work. Plan b. was to try and do the whole thing digitally. Originally I was quite keen to do it physically, so that it had an intrinsic realness to it. But if that wasn’t going to work and I wasn’t going to give up it had to be the computer.

So my new plan was to jump back in the work flow at the rotoscoping stage and do it all again more accurately (as unlike before there was no longer going to be a subsequent stage where I would cut and refine this). Once everything was cut out on the computer I was left with the outline of the dancers that I could put in front of any footage.  Next I went back to the little scene I created in the house and tried to recreate the camera movement of the source footage in real time with my camera and two pieces of slidey broken mirrors. I placed a couple of markers down so I could later track my camera movements in After Effects – these later proved redundant but it looks like I know what doing with little blue crosses on the set.

Next I brought this footage into the computer and got after effects to tack the movement of my shot.  I also tracked the original camera moves from the source footage of the dancers, and kind of swapped them over in a manor of speaking. The effect of this being that the net camera movement of both sets of footage is together and we don’t have dancers too obviously floating off into to space where they shouldn’t be.

That’s basically as far as I have got. It remains to be seen whether grading and postproduction will be able to give the dancers the look that they are physically there in the space.  But I will keep going and see how if I can make this work. In the mean time here is some test footage from the rotoscoped attempt.

https://vimeo.com/84604459

<iframe src=”//player.vimeo.com/video/84604459″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p>Untitled from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/wilkiebranson”>Wilkie Branson</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

The Boing tour has finished and I’m back at home with some time on my hands.  So I thought I would make a new video. An idea came to me whilst I was lying on my side waiting for some ear drops to do their work. The idea seemed quite simple at first; take existing clips of the dance films I’ve made, print and cut out the dancers in a miniature form and then stop frame animate them dancing around the house. Simple…

It wasn’t long before I realized this was going to take quite a considerable amount of time, so I thought it would be interesting to document the process and progress (or lack of it) on here.

Already I suspected that this would take quite a long time to do each second of animated footage and my idea involved mixing this animation in with the original film, so the first step was to make and rough cut of the finished film – so as to be sure that I was only animating what I was going to use. Once this was done the fun began.

The process of this animation divides roughly into 3 steps.

1: Extracting the dancers from their backgrounds and printing them out.

2: Cutting them out.

3: Rebuilding the scene in the house and taking a picture of each frame.

The first thing to think about is the frame rate. All of my films are shot at 25 frame per second, which is the standard for PAL footage and slightly faster than the 24 used in cinema (with the exception of Peter Jackson). Hence to try and recreate this in animation would mean extracting, cutting and shooting 25 frames for every second. In roughly 2.5 minuets of animation that would be 25 times 60 times 2.5. Which is 3750 frames! And thats assuming there is only one dancer in each frame (which there isn’t). More dancers mean more cutting. In order to give good results but not be too ambitious I went for 12 frames per second, it remains to be seen if this was still to ambitious.

So the first step is to export the relevant sequence (the one that I want to animate) from final cut pro as a 12fps sequence and import it into after effects. Once it’s in after effects I can go through each frame using the rotobrush tool to cut around the dancer. Its quicker than just doing it in Photoshop as the tool predicts what it is you want to extract (sometimes correctly and sometimes not). But because I only want to roughly isolate the dancer to save on ink when printing, I’m going to cut it out exactly later, it’s relatively quick; Takes under 10 seconds a frame. Next, again to save ink and paper, I need to put as many of the cut out dancers as I can fit onto a single sheet of paper. I use Photoshop to do this. It’s pretty straight forward except for the size of the dancers. Because I’m going to recreate the scene physically in miniature I need to adjust the size of all the dancers so that they are all the same. If I don’t when a dancer dancers into the background they’ll get smaller and if I’m making them dance into the background in my miniature reconstruction they will get smaller again.  The best I can do with this is a rough approximation and it remains to be seen just how significant slight inaccuracies will be here. Fingers crossed.

Here you can see After Effects and a good example of how the Rotobrush tool can’t be trusted to cut everything out by itself (the purple line should just be around the dancer).

Here you can see lots of little dancers getting lined up in Photoshop ready for printing.

So, after printing I sit for hours (days) with a scalpel and a head torch and cut out each dancer. In this first scene, which is 12 seconds, I have cut out 154 little Shantala’s and 40 little Joel’s. Once this is done its time to shoot it all and get it back into the computer. I haven’t done this bit yet, so I will update my progress in later. But essentially what I need to do is create a little scene in the house, in which the geometry approximates to that of the original scene, calculate and map out any camera movements that happened in the original scene and shoot it all frame by frame on a stills camera. Simple? We shall see…

Cutting…

Lots of little people

thats 194 dancers cut out there…

Photo: Joel Daniel

After a week off I find myself writing on the train again, on route to Bristol to begin the second half of the Boing! tour. 50 more shows will take me through Christmas and up to the new year. I had intended to write this final chapter of my “catching up” blog at my leisure whilst at home, but no sooner had I arrived a mass infestation of fabric eating carpet beetle was reveled to me. Subsequently my girlfriend and I spent most of our holiday hoovering beetle lave out from between the cracks in the floorboards and frequenting the local launderette, where we staged something of a strategic coup in order to facilitate the washing of some 200kg of assorted fabrics. After 50 man hours, a new vacuum, 15 cedar wood blocks, a liter of bleach and about fifty quid’s worth of loose change for the launderette, the question on everyone’s mind was; where did the bloody things come from? Which leads me neatly on to the last episode of my belated blog; India.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, myself and Joel Daniel visited India during the spring, touring White Caps. It was during this tour that the British Council started cooking up an idea for the development of a new work that would bring together Bboying and the traditional Indian dance of Kahtak. So in September we headed back out to Kolkata to collaborate with dancer Mital Sengupta of Rythmosaic and percussionist Shiladitya Bose on a 3 week residency. Working in Rythmosaic’s studio, we were to set about exploring the possibilities in the meeting points of the two dances, culminating in sharing’s at Kolkata’s ICCR and then at the Bengaluru International Arts festival.

Having worked across several Indian provinces already we were quite confident that we would be able to handle anything the subcontinent could throw our way. On our arrival at the airport, tired and bewildered at 4 am, it offered us this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

I couldn’t tell you what that is/was, only that its large (that’s my hand next to it) and that fortunately it was dead when we found it.

Needless to say work got underway in good time and beneath the thundery skies of the late monsoon season we set about discovering where our dances met and where they diverged. One of the most incredible things that struck me as we began to work was the significance and immense complexity of rhythmic patterns in Kathak. As Mitul recited, notated and danced various time-cycles and their rhythms, both the magnitude of possibility and the challenge that we were undertaking became clear.  Then we discovered this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

I believe it is quite difficult to kill a cockroach; the ones to be found in the studio first thing in the morning for the most part seemed to be on their last legs /backs. Which we were thankful for as nothing kills the creative mood more for the immersed dancer who is embracing the movement possibilities of a floor (rolling around) than a scuttling cockroach. Whist we are on the subject of cockroaches a good piece of advice for those visiting areas where they’re in abundance is to make sure that when you purchase your RAID bug killer to protect from mosquitos in the night, make sure you get the variety that JUST kills mosquitoes. What you will find is that if you get the kind which also kills cockroaches, spraying it around your room before bed will render all the cockroaches lurking behind things somewhat delirious. Before they die, they will come out and scuttle around in a disorderly fashion for several hours, climbing on and over everything they come across, including you.

Back to the work, one of the other great points of juxtaposition between our dance’s seemed to be the context. The story telling nature of Kathak and the way the dancer and musicians present various narratives though a codified language of gesture differs considerably from the cyphers and battles of Bboying.  But even here, in the form of the exchange between the dancer and the tabla payer, there are parallels. In Kathak the call and response relationship between dancer and tabla leads to a percussive battle of sorts with each trying to delve deeper into the rhythm. This battle element and the improvisation it brings aligns strongly with bboying and gives the somewhat formal structure of the dances performance presentation a raw edge. We went to see an evening of traditional Kathak and again the complexity of just what we were trying to do became apparent.  In amongst being drawn into this evening of storytelling and blisteringly complex rhythmical recital my leg started to itch. The next day it looked like this:

Photo: Joel Daniel

Those tiny little boils of puss are apparently the reaction to the toxic glands found on a spiders legs. They were quite sore but I was assured that they did not contain hundreds of incubating spider eggs. This proved to be true.

Despite the short time scales, the meeting of two very different worlds, and a spectrum of bug based challenges, we developed a short work to share and received great feedback on the avenues we’d perused.  We were very fortunate to have Chhandak Pradhan with us documenting the process and below are a selection of some of his photos. We will be going back out to continue the work in March. To start refining what we are discovering into a performance, which will hopefully be touring later in 2014. It was an amazing experience to go out and work in India again and despite our insect encounters Wikipedia tells me its probably more likely the carpet beetles in my flat came in from the garden than the streets of Kolkata. And the train pulls into Bristol and the next leg of Boing! performances begins that brings me more or less up to date with my blogs.

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India

Photo: Chhandak Pradhan, British Council India