To create the opening for my TV show, I will be using the technique of stop-motion in which you take various pictures and put them altogether to create one big piece; here is an example of some photograph's I have taken for my final stop-motion video.
It shows my main subject 'Sonny' pulling a mobile phone out of her pocket and answering it, and in my finalised one, it will be followed up by pictures of her finding out about her 'big chance', going through Hollywood and etc. Also, as you can see from these pictures, the background is quite bland and boring and if you had this as an opening for a television show, it wouldn't look very professional. So, for the final video, I will cut around 'Sonny' in each picture individually and then proceed to put different images and text around her, portraying the idea of her in Hollywood; I will show how I've done this on another post about the editing process.
Here is an example of all my photograph's put together as one:
This is just a simple video showing how all of my images would fit together; I have put the pictures together on iMovie and made each picture last for 0.1 seconds. Although, in my final one, I would make certain pictures last longer than other ones for different effects; for example, the picture after the phone call would last longer as it is a big impact on the opening and the most important part - I also might put some sort of big effect over it to make it stand out more, like Photoshopping a window of an aeroplane that would slowly merge over her, to make it seem like she's on an aeroplane to Hollywood, followed by some sort of animation like one of my original example ones of the plane going over America.
To begin my editing process, I started off by cutting out my subject in Photoshop so that it would enable me to, later on, be able to put different effects behind my them and onto my stop-motion animation.
Final Animation Editing Example
To achieve this, I firstly selected the 'polygon lasso' tool in the left-hand-side tool bar and then proceeded to cut around my subject using this; I found it easiest to cut out 'Sonny' when I had zoomed in to at least 300% as it made for a better finish and look when you had zoomed back out because I had been more precise. As you can see from the print screen above, there is a grey line forming around the outside of my subject, this is me using the tool to cut around her.
After this, and when I had cut all the way around her, I joined my finishing line up to the one which I had started on and it gave a dotted outline to my picture, letting me know that it was finished and this was the part which was selected.
To finish off, I duplicated the background layer so that there were now two; the background layer and layer one. I made sure my selected marquee piece was on the correct picture, and then by clicking the eye-tool next to the layer name, I hid the background layer so that when I had cut out my subject and deleted the background, there were no background colours which could disrupt the editing process.
I then, right-clicked on the piece of the picture which was selected and chose the option 'Select Inverse', which changed the marquee so that it was selecting the outside of my person. Then, I chose to delete that part of it using the delete key on my keyboard, and this made the outside around 'Sonny' vanish; this is how I achieved the effect of cutting out my subject, and after this, it will enable me to properly edit my pictures and make my stop-motion look exciting and more professional.
