(You can see it here.)
It's taken me far too long to complete, what with laziness, tedium, losing a load of work and being put off and having to find the right live-action elements to include. But it's done.
It's almost ironic that the part of the process I knew the least about and had never attempted before, took me the least amount of time. I started this morning and finished a short while ago. (That was compositing the animation with the live footage of the book.)
I think it worked out well too, considering I took the lazy approach and avoided using After Effects and masks - instead winging it with the limited effects in Premiere and a prayer that the clumsy edits won't be noticeable during viewing. (I don't think they are.)
I'm actually incredibly pleased with how it's come out. Especially how well I managed to make digitally animated scans, combined with footage of a blank page, look like closeup shots of an actual book.
It was challenging given the inconsistent colouring of a lot of the source images (that I probably should've corrected at the first stage rather than last) and I ended up using a lot more and far different effects than I imagined when I first conceptualised it.
In particular not being able to chroma key the image backgrounds and having to add digital shadows to mimic those of the page-turn to make them more seamless.
Below are some screenshots to pique your interest/allow me to show off.
 |
| I had to write a load of nonsense to make the scenes look more like real book pages. They're not even complete sentences; there's nothing before the left edge of the shot. |
 |
| I'm not going to pretend that I don't think I'm a genius for adding a layer of mirrored text to emulate the look of the adjoining page showing through the paper. |
 | |
| I think the overall effect is convincing. I'd believe this is a photo of a book page, and I KNOW that I made it. |
