Cartooner

jcskeeter

jcskeeter

Well-known member
Hi everyone, just have a question. I have a project coming up where I need to make video look like a "cartoon". Basically there is a picture of a guy on a package and it is a watercolor picture. The idea is to have the package come to life and the guy will then come out of the package and do certain things and at one point he would be talking in the package. So what I need is some type of plugin or 3rd party software that will give me that look of a watercolor painting. I will be editing on FCP but have AE and Motion at my disposal as well. If anyone has any ideas please let me know or if anyone has done a similar effect let me know how it went. Thanks for any information. J
 
there is a really good AE / illustrator tutorial on the creative cow site on turning video to cartoon
 
Blaine hit the nail on the head!!!!!

I just taught a Studio Artist class today at a special high school for the talented and gifted. I've been using (and teaching) SA for years. Even have a tutorial on it for videographers coming out very soon. NOTHING in the wold does it better, but then, there's nothing in the world like it.
 
Another vote for SA. The watercolor brushes are where this thing freaking shines. My advice for watercolors on SA....

1) Get a "how to paint watercolors book" for visual reference - it helps. Alternately, look at some of the watercolors of the American greats like John Singer-Sargent, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth, either online or with a book.

2) Get a rough textured piece of watercolor paper from an Art Supply store, and scan it. This will be a static layer in the background of your "painting".

3) Make sure you make your first layer a pencil/graphite sketch - rarely do you see a watercolor painting without this.

4) Make your first watercolor layer loose, lightly colored, with HARD edges. This method is called painting "light to dark".

5) Make your last watercolor layer tight, hitting all the details, darkening the darks, using softer edges.

You can add a few more layers in between steps 4 & 5, although in processing a movie, you may just want to keep the watercolor layers to a minumum, as every step adds exponential time spent processing.

Cool thing about SA, is once you have done your look for one frame, and saved it as a PASeq, your work is done, the rest is processing.

Here are some online watercolor painting resources I found valuable in helping me emulate the look in SA....

A step by step watercolor painting tutorial by Yong Chen

http://www.yongchen.com/lwatercolor/

John Singer-Sargent gallery - includes his oils, watercolors, charcoal. A couple to look at in particular are "Miss Eden", and "On The Verandah". His style is realistic at a distance, but messy and mathematical as you get closer.

http://www.jssgallery.org/

This has RGB values for nearly every "painter's" color that would be used in a traditional watercolor palette. Finding out how many colors were used, choosing a palette, is very important to emulating a painter's style. Some watercolorists only used three colors, and derived everything else from the use of these three colors - Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna, and Yellow Ochre. Many watercolorists don't actually paint the color "white" instead using the color of the paper as white. Some actually use White Gouache, which is a thicker watercolor white, either Zinc White or Titanium White, in conjunction with the white of the paper. Most of these painting strategies can be emulated in some way on SA.

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/colour/colourspace/
 
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Using the Vecorizer to do both the image and outline, I get killer "cartoon" results.

I'd also like to point out that I use SA not only for the "artistic" looks, but to get regular footage to simply look better. There are things you can do to lighten up and tint and color and effect video clips in SA that you just can't do anywhere else.
 
BenB said:
Using the Vecorizer to do both the image and outline, I get killer "cartoon" results.

I'd also like to point out that I use SA not only for the "artistic" looks, but to get regular footage to simply look better. There are things you can do to lighten up and tint and color and effect video clips in SA that you just can't do anywhere else.
Click to expand...

The Image Compressor is worth the price of entry alone.
 
Wow. That program looks very impressive (SA). How's the learning curve??

Some of the "user video's" look similar to something I've had in the back of my mind for some time now, just never knew how to go about getting it out.
 
rcbrown23 said:
Wow. That program looks very impressive (SA). How's the learning curve??

Some of the "user video's" look similar to something I've had in the back of my mind for some time now, just never knew how to go about getting it out.
Click to expand...

Learning curve is really as steep, or as shallow, as you need, or actually want. Meaning, kind of like most synthesizers these days, you can use presets, or you can delve way deeper, almost as far down the rabbit hole as your imagination will take you. The program is by the guy who basically invented DAW software, so it really has a good number of audio paradigms in the functional operation of SA. Kind of refreshing for graphics software.

In the years I've been using it, there are only a few things I've ever come up with that I thought might be a useful addition, useful enough that I told him (John Dalton) about it, and oddly enough, he had already been thinking of it, and kind of tinkering on it. One of the things I've suggested is sort of an auto paletting, superior to what exists now in the program, which is really cool, but this idea I had, and that he was already working on would require a whole new way of looking at color, separate from RGB, LHS, CMYK, etc., taking into account real world factors like discolorations, uneven-ness of color, how black assembled from multiple colors looks, naturalistic white points, things like that.

This guy is on a singular mission to make the single most innovative graphics program ever, and he really doesn't care what his market share is, or how small his user base is. While I was working on my latest feature with the program, he sent me close to seven new builds of the program, simply because I was asking it to do something it wasn't quite capable of yet, but probably should have been. Build after build until he got it right. THAT'S CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! If I ever came into a problem like that with FCP, there's no way the designer would call me and go, okay how do you want this to work. John did that with SA.
 
Yes, I've been dealing with John and Synthetik for several years now. I do the occational "Intro to Studio Artitst for Videographers" seminar. The first thing I tell people is, "Forget everything you ever learned about any application, any operating system, any graphics work flow. This is one of the most unique creative experiences you'll ever have on a computer. But this app is a whole new universe unto itself."

I think you other SA users here will agree.

I would say that if you do the tutorials they have on-line first, you'll get a great head start. Each is very short, and though the list looks long, you could do it all in half a day. One half of a single day, you'd know enough Studio Artist to start doing some amazing things.

Then there's the THREE tutorial disks full of MPEG-4 QuickTimes that cover everything. There's a PDF video tutorial guide that also catagorizes the tutorials it comes with, such as beginer, intermediate, advanced. So you don't get lost in them. There's tons of them! There's no end to training when you buy this. Months and months of training come right there in the package!

John Dalton, look him up, research what he's done in the past. A very impressive resume. And really gives you customer serice you won't find anywhere else.

And for us, SA is not only about "artistic" effects. It's also about enhancing video footage, not for effect, but for stylistic look, in ways you can't get anywhere else. I can lighten up or darken, desaturate or over saturate footage in ways no other application is capable, period.

Learning curve? Well, if you want to MASTER the app right away, then yeah. If you want to just hunt and peck at presets, then no. If you want to understand it enough to use it productively, well, one day of tutorials, and they're all on-line. You can download the demo and do the on-line tutorials and by the time you learn it, you'll be more than ready to pony up the dollars for it!

Nothing works like it, nothing can do with it does, nothing comes close.

AE all you want, it's still not going to do what SA can.
 
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WOW. You guys seem really adamant about this program. I'm a little boggled that I haven't heard of it before. I guess I've been spending my time learning other programs (AE in particular) and been slacking on the "finding new software".

I'm DEFINITELY going to do as suggested and spend some time [soon] to go through the tutorials, and see what I come up with. From the looks of it, though, it looks like something I've been after for quite some time.

Thanks for the tips, and I'll be sure to let everyone know how my experience (as a complete newb) evolve's.

Mastering software is where I lack... but I'm a quick learner, and I'm sure I'll be able to at least achieve a few things I've been after. I'm really good at scratching the surface and getting in a little deeper than most, but mastering is far from where I'd describe my abilitie's, unfortunately.

-brown

Still learning stuff every day from this site, and this thread is a prime example.:beer:
 
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