“Ink and Paper” is how we named the style we saw in the end credit work of Sherlock Holmes by Danny Yount from Prologue Films. Here is the result of our attempt to compile different techniques into this unique look:

We started by examining the clip, watching every single frame while thinking about the different footage we would need. We filmed a seagull on Embarcadero for our main footage and used some free stock footage from “Lost and Taken” on the background. Looking through our libraries, we stumbled across the ink drop footage from “Video Copilot”, but we figured they didn’t quite match our desired look and feel.

To create the inksplatter shaped transitions, we first tried to use wet maps. A wet map is a 2D representation of water particles hitting a surface. We ended up using Maya and Realflow, which gave us the possiblility to control every single bit of the animation. The biggest issue of the fluid simulation were the almost unbearable computing time needed for the calculation and the result looking to symmetrical.

To get the fluids going we created a fluid sphere falling onto a wedge shaped mesh. To spare some calculation time, we rendered out with a fairly low particle mount, making it up by adding a vector blur in AfterEffects. CC vector blur compares the single frames of a clip and computes the speed of its pixels in order to blur them depending on their velocity.

This technique is powerful, but not exactly perfect for really smooth ink bleeds. We used the result of it for our first big transition as it had to fade quickly, but we had to switch to more subtle practices for the subsequent transitions.
If you are interested in how the fluid simulation in RealFlow works in detail, send us an email and we’ll get back to you!

We started by spilling ink on usual paper towels. We used our Canon EOS 7D for this step, running it at 720p @ 50fps. Recording with 50 fps gives us the advantage of having enough information if we want to slow down our shot afterwards. Since we thoughtlessly borrowed our tripod to a friend we had to improvise, resulting in the following setup:

Milk and ink mix too messy, so we had to switch to blotting-paper. The result is really great, and we will give away the pre-keyed footage in a post within the next week.

 


After loading the clip into After Effects we first stabilized the motion. Although we improvised a tripod, there was still some shaking going on. We did some color correction on the ink drops with a simple levels adjustment.
The original footage was pretty shaky but as the motion is pretty fast, we were able to pull it off without wasting time in stabilizing. Using an Optics Compensation filter we turned down the Field Of View to slightly stretch the corners — which eventually conceals most of the camera wiggle.

One does not have to watch the clip very meticulously to see that there is some material drawn by hand in it. We printed out a still frame of our footage from the position at which we wanted to freeze our real-time clip, and drew parts of it on tracing paper, using a simple HB pencil. After scanning the image we were able to composite it right on top of our original footage. We used the previously created ink drops as Luma Inverted Mask to mask the drawn seagull and the rail on the bottom. Try to use the easing keyframe interpolations (rightclick on a keyframe > Keyframe Assistant) as often as possible, as it smoothes the transitions of your keyframes!

After we positioned these elements we could focus on the background. We loaded the grungy paper texture on top of our original footage and then placed the wet map obtained from RealFlow on top of that. Using the level adjusted wet map as a Luma Inverted Mask on our paper background we could eventually fade in the paper with a splashy effect.

To add more color and structure we took our previously printed still frame into Photoshop and extracted the rail area and the seagull. Using several ink stroke brushes, we drew out the filling of our foreground elements. To fortify the dirty look we added a few more ink drops and color corrected the result to fit the rest. To fade it into our composition we used a free hi-res watercolor picture sample from Gomedia and animated the value of an applied threshold filter.

To make it look like the watercolor is being sucked into the paper a blend mode like overlay will do the trick.

The reason the piece works so nicely is that there is some movement going on with every single element, even if its just very subtle. If you look closely, you will see that even the paper background is changing position and rotation smoothly, barely notable. It seems to be a tiny detail, but its crucial for the overall smoothness of the final scene.

The title is hand-written and scanned as well, animating the single strokes of it gets very easy using the WriteOn filter. Animating the position of the brush and adjusting the tangents of the created keyframes will feed the filter with the necessary information to “draw” the title (we’ve called it “signature” in our downloadable source file). Just make sure the setting Paint Style is set to Reveal Original Image. As the ink of our title doesn’t just stick on the paper, we duplicated the layer and put it behind our original title. Applying a Gaussian Blur and animating the Bluriness value over time gives the look of ink seeping into paper. A final adjustment layer is a good way to add an overall color tint — we used a ramp to add some contrast by tinting the upper left corner reddish and the lower right one greenish.

The whole project is downloadable in this complete package.
We prerendered the video footage as JPEG sequence to avoid compression problems and to decrease the package size when sharing the project.

We owe the neat soundtrack to our friends from FATMAGIC; the slow-motion sound is from the time-warped footage, which has the big advantage of keeping the sound of the bird’s fluttering hearable.

See the final clip on top of this post ↑

Jake & Dan

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