Since Hayley and I had finished animating, we agreed to come together again to do some post production, or at least try to stabilise our work. I didn't think that this would take long at all, but I was proved wrong when we kept receiving failure notices and errors, every time we used the warp stabiliser and the motion tracking stabiliser. With Annabeth's help, she informed us that the reason for these failures, was due to the image being so large. In addition to that, we were trying to stabilise multiple scenes at once where there were black cut scenes in between. We were told that this forces After Effects to struggle interpreting the footage with the stabiliser tool, so I started off by stabilising each scene individually, and it seemed to work rather well!
To stabilise the animation, I chose the 'stabilise motion' tool on the tracker menu under the animation panel, which prompted a small square with another square and an anchor inside of it. With this anchor, I chose a point of interest that never changes throughout the animation, so there would always be one reliable point in the clip. Annabeth helped us to begin with, so she advised the small piece of grass as indicated in the left image. Once I had done this, I clicked 'play forward' which ran the stabilisation through and then I applied to X and Y.
Since the stabilising does warp the animation/move the video around in some way, I had to enlarge it so that there were no odd bits chopped off at the sides, or blank spaces. A good thing about our images was that we had taken them quite far back so that it left us with an opportunity to zoom in if need be!
These are the newt scenes fully stable! These were the ones which needed to be done the most, as they were quite shaky and choppy, but not so bad. This was because we were just starting out animating, and getting used to the format of things and how the floor moved, as well as other varying factors.
However once we got to the sheep scene, which is what we animated last, there is barely any shake (even though I stabilised it here), which I think shows just how far we have come and what we have had to do to avoid it! I quite enjoyed this part of the post production process, as I learnt something new which I think will really benefit me in my future, even if I filmed something in live action, I know how I could possibly stabilise it!
We then had a go at trying to replace our green screen which made our animation REALLY come to life, but sadly we had no memory on both of our machines to save the file, so Hayley is going to take this part of post production and do it at home. What concerned me when editing the newt scene was the halo around the edge of him. Hayley didn't mind this but I thought it was quite distracting, so I played around with the black and white shaders, as well as the smoothness/blurriness option and it ended up coming out fine and wasn't much to worry about. With such an easy fix I think Hayley will do a really good job replacing the backgrounds and I am so excited to see how they turn out!
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