Mother's Days : Post-production : Christmas Lights Test 01

Image 01.

Clip 01. Green screen

Clip 02. Composite

I had originally planned to use my skills from school to wire up a small set of LED christmas lights to my puppet powered by batteries, but I thought there could be a simple way of using the combination of stop-motion with CG for this. I had a feeling that if I were to cover a piece of wire with black shrink wrap, paint white dots on it in intervals to represent bulb placement then wrap it around her head, this would be enough of a base to add lights in post-production. Once I had some footage to test out my theory, I opened up Photoshop, painted one single dot with the airbrush in a medium vibrant blue then saved it out and imported the png into After effects. 

Image 02.

I placed a duplicate of the blue dot onto each white dot that was on Doris's head wire then alternated the lights to flash on and off for each 4 frames in three sets. When all of the key frames had been quadruple checked to make sure the rhythm was in time, I changed the layer types to colour dodge and this gave the perfect glow I had thought it would on her christmas hat (see image 01).