anna firth

Scanimator’s Guide to Paper Compositing

Materials: peg bar , hole puncher, pen/pencil/etc, paper , tracing surface, scanner, photoshop

Overview: I am using paper to create an acetate cel effect by drawing assets on paper layers over a paper background.

This is the STIGMATA scene from a video. It’s a loop I have traced over a background. I will be scanning it and creating an asset layer to composite into the scene. My video is in black and white so I want to keep the nice copy paper texture inside the characters.

 I am using a 1/4” round peg bar to match my hole puncher. It’s a flat metal one designed for scanning. You can use any hole puncher with adjustable heads with this peg bar.

I use copy paper from Costco ~$12 for 2,000 sheets I believe. I also like the B5 copy paper at Oomomo because it is smaller and more translucent.

For this method you’ll want to make sure you are closing your lines as you draw. It took me a long time to get this habit but this will make sense later. Just make sure your lines all make closed shapes without gaps. You’ll see I’m putting all my assets in the foreground so I have created shapes that fit in the spaces of the background. This is strange and specific to my project and you will probably want to create a foreground layer.

I move my peg bar from the tracing surface to the scanner. I’m using an Epson Perfection V39 with the lid ripped off. It is USB powered and simple. I think this one was ~$70. I like portability and simplicity over image quality. I carry this scanner between home and my studio pretty often so the size is nice. It also uses the same cord as my tracing surface- lovely.

I use a stack of paper taped together as my “lid.” it just keeps the paper pressed closely to the scanner. I usually also gently press with both hands as it scans to make sure there’s even pressure.

I’m in EPSON SCAN 2. This is a free program I downloaded. I like it because I can scan fast in big batches and it makes me nice folders of my images. My main goal is to keep the same size and placement of each image.

I’ve adjusted my settings and hit preview but it is showing me a cropped version because the scanner thinks I just want to scan the area with image. I want a bigger scan area so it doesn’t crop later frames.

Luckily my roommate is sitting next to me with a big magic marker so I use it to mark up a rejected frame tp trick the scanner into thinking my images fill the whole scan area. If you keep the preview window open, the rest will follow suit.

Ok, that looks good. I can see my page number and the peg bar so I am good to start scanning. I can set the dummy page aside and start putting in my sequence and pressing scan. Again, keep the preview window open. You will continue to see the first image.

Check your destination folder once in a while to make sure everything is looking good. In this batch I didn’t check and I actually had a hair on the scanner the whole time…

I’ve scanned my scene so now I’m in Photoshop where I will load my files into layers in a script called “Load Files into Stack.”

sort by name if they load out of order

Now I’m going through my frames/layers with the paint bucket tool (G) and painting a green (you can use any color that’s not in your art) on all the areas that I want to be transparent. In this one I am going for the background and all the nooks between arms and body. Set your tolerance to a lower number if the paint is eating at your lines too much. Brush green over blemishes or stains that the bucket tool (G) doesn’t cover.

A lot of people ask why I do this step. I could magic wand (w) tool out the lines but then my whole image would be clear and I would have to refill the character with color. When working with batch editing you want to work fast and efficiently so dumping a “green screen” in to make the magic wand (w) tool grab the right area quickly works for me and it’s a fun blast of color.

So I’m going along and find a spot where I didn’t close my line. This means my characters hand would get lost so I take the brush (b) tool and quickly touch in some green. I could match the black line but I’m working too fast to change colors and no one will notice when it’s at 24 fps. : )

saved!

To select every bit of color on your frame make sure you uncheck “contiguous” in your settings bar. If you have residual color you can adjust your tolerance. Use a good shortcuts workflow to do this fast. I click on my layer, adjust visibility to make sure I’m in the right place then:

W for magic wand tool > click green > delete > command D to deselect > change layers and repeat.

Now you have a pretty stack of frames! You can see the contours of where I drew around the background now.

At this point I have also cropped to 16:9 which got rid of the peg bar and page numbers.

now I can use this stack as a template to place my scene in about the right spot on my bg

Pull up your timeline window

Make frames from layers in the menu on the top right of your timeline window.

Delete your background layer by selecting and hitting the frame trash can. It will stay as a layer you just don’t need Photoshop thinking its a frame. I’ve also selected all my frames and put a .1 sec delay in to slow it down. I think this will be controversial but this is a quick and dirty workflow- yes, there’s a better way to do this that involves exploring all these layers as pngs and bringing them back in as a video layer but this project was in rush mode so I went this fast route.

Now I go back to the timeline menu and Convert to video timeline. From here I can make my background visible again and make adjustments to placement. Then I hide my background and get ready to export the sequence.

My destination is Premiere and I already have a version of the background waiting in my Premiere project so I just want to export my new asset. Most important here is that I have selected Straight - Unmatted in my render options. This will keep the space around my characters transparent.

Now I can put those puzzle pieces together in premiere!