PRODUCTION – Rotoscope Shooting

It had been determined from fairly early on that the majority of the character animations would be rotoscoped from live action. Since I was not very confident in my ability to create beautiful character animations in an efficient manner necessary to meet the production schedule, rotoscoping was viewed as an ideal time-saving measure that did not compromise animation quality.

Since my original actress was no longer available (delays from switching to Plan B meant that we were unable to shoot with her before her study exchange tour), finding a replacement actress on short notice proved to be quite a challenging affair, with me finalizing production deals just days before the scheduled shooting period.

Synchronizing each production member's timeslots proved to be a delicate act: most of them had very compact schedules, making the times where all were available scarce and too little to be utilized effectively. To get around this, the shooting schedule was broken up and organized according to crew availability. For example, Woermann happened to be only available on the days that Jenner had class; therefore we shot Woermann's solo scenes during Jenner's class, and vice versa. This allowed us to capitalize on precious little time that the two actresses had together.

The shooting sequence was also organized methodologically; instead of shooting in chronological order, substantial time was spent determining each shot's required camera position and set up (complicated shots involving moving the camera were lumped together, while scenes in which the camera behaved similarly were also placed together to minimize downtime between shots).

For the production, we used the Canon 5D mk.II DSLR camera provided by the SCM Production Center. I had briefly considered using the C300 (as it had 4k resolution and could record up to 60fps), but was ultimately dropped as I realized that shooting would have been significantly more troublesome given the hardware's complexity and that editing would have also been substantially more difficult given the files' significantly larger filesize.

As some shots required dynamic uses of the camera, we had to also come up with ways to let the camera move around. To do this we employed three tactics:

• Jib. This allowed the camera to pivot around on a pivoting arm instead of being locked on a tripod swivel.
• Tripod wheel base. This allowed the camera jib assembly to “orbit” the actresses when needed.
• Track. This allowed the camera to traverse down a straight line. This was only used in scenes when using the tripod wheel base was not permitted or unnecessary.