Dancing effects

Ive been asked to come up with some dancing effects. I was wondering if you guys had done anything similar, They are asking for cool looking trail effects and impact ripples or things of that nature.

Didnt supply me with a reference other than a sating a but like Dr Stange

I once separated the image into RGB, tinted the separations accordingly then offset them in either time, space or both. When the separations periodically realigned they would form the proper image. The dancers were shot on black.

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Thats sounds pretty cool, thanks.
Unfortunately here its all been shot in a dance off situation so whatever i do it will have to be roto all the way.

Will definatley give this a go. Is your shot online?

If you don’t have time to create masks to drive the effects, you could do some rough trace animations. Yes, I’m talking about frame-by-frame painting, but only where the motion is big and with thick bold colorful lines. You could also try adding impact reactions at abrupt changes in the motion, like glassy distort or particles…

Im not sure what the final should look like but it sounds like Runway ML will a very good start for isolating your dancers.

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If you want to lessen the roto burden, and since you’re not photorealistically comping them over a bg, but rather a creative/stylized effect, you could try motion vectors for the mattes.

Paint or mask one frame, set that frame as your ref for motion warping from the vectors from the plate, and see how it holds up. You might have to do refs and mattes at the beginning middle and end, etc. For this type of thing it might get you to a usable place.

I also think vectors will be your friend for lots of cool stylistic effects. Mess with those vectors, combine vectors from other takes and dancers, etc. You’ll get some trippy stuff.

@andymilkis made a great Python script that makes uv maps out of vectors so you don’t have to deal with all the caching and reaching nonsense.

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To @GPM ’s point above regarding motion vectors and using different vectors from different takes and timings or even different motions all together, I made a music video for some Brooklyn Indie Art rock friends a few years ago using that technique extensively. Keep in mind that this was supposed to be very gritty- so gritty it is, but really easy to get some nice datamoshing type effects that can create some cool trails and displacement. JOBS - "Pink" [Official Music Video] - YouTube

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Yeah this is a breaking dancing project so not sure vectors will hold up for mattes. Basiclaly typical break dancing setup with a crowd forming a circle if you know what i mean. The data moshing idea is relaky interesting though!

I think I did it on 1" tape with both a GVG24-3 and a GVG32-2 switchers, an farouja decoder and a pair of ADO’s, so I doubt it’s online.

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Playing with Recursive Operations might be cool

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Absolutely give runwayml.com a shot at giving you some roto. It’s insane.

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Bit worried about uploading material to be honest, might land me in big trouble.

Then you’ll clients will gladly pay for you to outsource roto to an approved vendor. :slight_smile:

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