Mini Movie/Animated Cap Tutorial

Hello, glorious children. This is the Queen of the Crazies here, with a tutorial on a musical no one but me and a few other geeks really even care about!

'Here Comes Mama' Tutorial

1. I have the good fortune of being geeky enough to download my source video off of the internets. In case anyone is wondering, it's Bernadette Peters as Rose in her performance of 'Rose's Turn' at some Tony Awards. I used KMPlayer to make my caps, which is relatively easy as soon as you get the Language setting on 'English'. :P These are the caps I used:

A Clicky-Clicky

2. I knew immediately after taking my batch of caps that Bernadette Peters is too sexy for words I loved the hand gesture at the line 'Ready or not / Shh / Here comes Mama.' It struck me as very intriguing, almost provocative. So I picked out the caps, and stuck them all on separate layers in one image, like so:

I. Open first image
II. Copy second image
III. Paste second image in a new layer on top of first image
IV. Repeat for all other images.

And then I realized. Bernadette might be sexy The caps might be nice, but coloring-wise, they were pretty sucky. The original vid, as you can no doubt tell, was very low-quality. I wanted to make the lighting very strong, so I slapped on a Curves layer, using these points:

    RGB - Pt. 1; 137, 173
           Pt. 2; 91, 58



As you can see, it brings out the contours of the image without bringing out all the sucky grainy bits of the image. :P I was actually too lazy to be bothered with actual coloring techniques, although, since I'm working from a PSD, I might have done something to her dress to make it a prettier purple and merged it.

(Smart, observant people will notice the slightly transparent line around the edge of the picture- either I liked the effect, or I was too lazy to fix it. Take your pick.)

3. I also wanted a text layer for this animation. I'm a big fan of Gypsy and knew I had to use one of the lyrics, so I took one directly from my favorite line: 'Here Comes Mama.' I wanted it to be readable, so I put it on top of a layer filled with black, but the font was very important to me. I didn't want a regular font, or a grungy or cursive font; I wanted something thick and blocky and there. I wanted a font that looked like it was making a bold statement. So I chose GF Ordner Normal, which is really one of my favorite fonts. I pasted it on its black layer on top of all my caps:



4. Finally, I was satisfied w/ text and caps, so I Jumped into Imageready; the button can be found in PS7 on the bottom of your toolbar. (: I arranged my caps in order, set each one to 0.1 sec delay (the text to 1 sec), hit play...

And it sucked.

No, seriously. My caps were way too choppy at that point to flow smoothly, so I knew I had to fix it while keeping the animation and caps shiny. So, I tweened my caps.



Tweening is really such a lovely thing. It provides an effective blend between two different frames, and I love it love it love it. I use it in most of my animations, actually, subtle though it might be.

So on every other cap (NOT THE TEXT), I applied these Tween settings:



And made it all shiny. On every regular cap, I kept the delay time 0.1 seconds; on the tween'd frames, I set the delay time to 0 seconds. I kept my text frame at 1 sec delay.

At 10 frames, it wasn't at all a bad animation, I don't think.



Eh? I like it.