Once we had selected the images we wanted to use we used the photocopier to get high resolution scans of the artwork from the comics.
There were three main stages to the edit process I used, each image followed the same basic principle with slight changes depending on the effect I was trying to create. Firstly I cut out different sections of the image using photoshop. Next I opened them in premiere and used keyframes to control how I wanted the image to move or an effect I had added. After exporting each clip of the edited images I put them in a new project and added the transitions between the clips. I felt that turning each image into its own clip and exporting them individually was the best way to go about it as it would give me much more flexibility later if I need to rearrange clips or alter how long they were shown for.
I did however have to reduce the number of shots that I had planned due to time and an underestimation of how long each image would take to edit.
PhotoShop
I started off by importing the full image into photoshop.
In order to cut out various parts of the image I had two main tools available, which both allow you to select a certain area of the image.
The first is the ‘quick selection tool’ this automatically traces an outline around areas that you click on, the advantage of this tool is that it allows you to very quickly cut out a section of an image. The downside however is that it can be very crude and difficult to use if the section of the image doesn’t have a clearly defined border, for this reason for the image above it would not be effective because there are two many similar colours and not enough clear edges.
The second tool and the one I used for this image was the ‘polygonal lasso tool’ this allows you to trace around an area of the image with straight lines allowing you to be much more accurate with the parts of the image you select. this tool is great for achieving near perfect cut outs from an image. However it also takes considerably longer to do and can quite annoying, as when you double click it will automatically complete the selection meaning you have to start again, this is a very easy mistake to make.
Once I had separated the different parts of the image I needed to fill in the blank space behind where I had cut them out.
To do this I used a combination of a tool called ‘Clone stamp’ and the fill content aware function. The fill function allowed me to select part of an image that was blank and fill it in with what the computer thinks should go there by scanning the remainder of the image. This was only a quick fix however and often wouldn’t work perfectly. This is where I needed to use the Clone stamp tool, this allowed me to select part of the image and paste it to another part of the image. This meant I could slowly piece together bits missing from the image with other bits of the image much like using skin from different areas of the body to repair damaged areas. Another useful aspect of this tool was that it would move its catchment area relative to where the mouse was on the image.
This left me with essentially 3 layers, the red background, Hit girl and the blood splatter foreground. Because not all of the Blood splatter had one continuous outline it meant I had to cut out the different splats separately and merge each layer together to create one plane that I could edit with. I then took these individual layers and exported them into premiere.
Premiere
After I had exported each layer of the image into premiere I put each one onto the timeline in its own layer.
For each layer I then added keyframes at the beginning and end of the clip adjusting the position of the image at each one, this meant that it would smoothly move across the screen independent of the other layers. I then did this to each layer moving them at different speeds and in different directions to create a feeling of depth and 3D like effect.
Matthew Tucker 