My students are shooting a film that includes a light saber battle, so I found a tutorial to help them figure out the effects. This is my rough test footage.
Some things:
- Rotoscoping is annoying and tedious.
- Rotoscoping is even more annoying and tedious when you realize halfway through it that you haven’t been setting keyframes.
- It’s easier to to animate large movements.
- It’s hard to match up prerecorded light saber sounds to new video. None of the sounds in this clip are timed properly, and most of them are the wrong sound altogether. I would have faked it with mouth noises, but Katherine is asleep and doesn’t need to wake up to me making buzzes and space burps.
- Square ended light sabers look weird.
I also made this opening for the morning bulletin. A few nerds on campus will get it.