Colouring the animation

Colouring the animation was a fairly straight forward task since the technique was already established in the pre production phase. Each scene with colour needed to be filled in frame by frame to then be composited in after effects using track mats. This was fairly easy to do just a little time consuming.

A problem I noticed when I composited the first colour was that I hadn't used proper water colour paper. The texture of the colouring and paper was not very nice and stuck out from the main background. I went a brought some actual nice water colour paper and the results were much better.

Another problem I encountered was having two separate colours with this technique. I was unsure how this would work as I couldn't try to have two colours in the track mat background as the animation moves over the still. I figured out I would have to colour the separate parts of the animation twice if I wanted two colours. This would allow me to set up two separate tracks mats afterwards.

We wanted the colour to feel realistic (like it was actual water colour) so I used the custom brush I developed previously during the experimenting phase of the project. I used this when the colour was brought into a scene to make it seem more natural. Using the angle jitter settings I made sure each brush stroke looked different. To keep the colour in the lines I tested between just rubbing out overlap and trying to colour using the selection tool. The problem with the selection tool is it often left very hard edges which looked very out of place.