Silhouetted Dancers
It wasn’t easy, but I finally finished silhouetting the “digital dancers” for the beginning of my piece. I brought the footage from filming in Mandell Theater Winter Term into Combustion and used a difference key to silhouette the dancers. After the footage was silhouetted, it needed to be brought into Flash and the bitmaps needed to be traced so that the letters could be programmed to bounce off the dancers.
Because the silhouettes were such big files, I had a lot of issues with Flash crashing. After a lot of tries, my thesis advisor suggested incorporating the silhouetted footage into the background cloud video. Next, he suggested I quarter size the silhouetted footage and bring that into Flash to trace the bitmaps. Then, he suggested to scale up the vectors to be the right size, turn the alpha down, and program them to interact with the letters. This turned out to be much less resource intensive for Flash and worked! For a before and after, check out the video.
If I could go back and do it again, I would have made all my dancers wear a piece of white fabric around their head (instead of only dancers with dark hair) because then I could have gotten a cleaner looking silhouette. I also wish I would have been able to find a white umbrella because sometimes the umbrella disappeared if a shadow was casted on it.
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