Companion Clip - Harbor Seal Movement Underwater

 

This is video is an excellent example of why I produce this kind of reference material. This is a companion video for a longer video I published showing Harbor Seal movement and behavior underwater. Without references like this, I would never be able to really understand the mechanics behind the movements these animals engage in. One of the things that I offer to people interested in these reference videos are stills collections. With these, anyone can watch and analyse the movement as if you had the video and were able to replay it in slow motion. Movement may appear at first glance to be simple, but quite often, what looks simple is really pretty complex, with multiple elements moving in concert or opposition to each other, depending on the desired outcome.

My Process For Creating Movement And Behavior Reference Videos

 My Process For Creating Movement and Behavior Reference Videos

I've been shooting footage and producing these videos for almost 3 weeks now and I think I have a pretty good system that works for me. So I decided to go ahead and write down the steps that I'm using and was quite surprised at just how many steps I use. The process is a little longer for large chunks of raw footage as I'm able to divide them up into different videos. The "Lion 20200906-1" video series is an example of that. It wound up being 6 videos long.

Anyway, for anyone interested in my process, here are the steps. It's a total of 20 steps in a 4 part process. 

Part A - Editing the raw footage

1 - Load the raw footage into Premiere Pro and watch it, usually at least twice, often more than that. While I'm watching the video I'm also taking notes and deciding what I want to keep, what I want to get rid of, and if it's going to be one video or a series. As mentioned above, the Lion 20200906-1 raw footage wound up being turned into a series of 6 separate videos, each showing different types of behavior and movement exhibited by a group of lions at the local zoo.

While I'm doing that, I also set up my folder tree for the project or series. I'm really anal about being organized with my files. Many of the videos also have stills collections available, and if I'm not organized properly it will be impossible to find the collections that are requested, or the ones that I want to use myself.

2 - Make the cuts, divide the raw footage into the videos that I'll be creating, apply any effects that I'll be using.

3 - Render a preview

4 - Make any adjustments and re-render if needed

5 - Once I'm happy with the video, I'll export it at the highest quality that I can, and it will go into a sub folder for that video labeled Graphics Footage. This is the footage that I'll pull stills from for the cards and also that I will pull stills from to use for drawings or paintings or anything else that I need a nice photo for.

6 - Apply the clip codes. When I used codes to catalog video or clips, they always refer back to the date that the raw footage was shot on. For the Lion series that was 20200906-1, which is the year, month and day, followed by the series number for that day which is 1. I shot video of the lions that day with both cameras. Series 1 was shot with the Kodak camera, Series 2 was shot with the Olympus camera. I use the two cameras for different situations, but I always have both with me. I prefer the better resolution of the Olympus, but there are some things that the little Kodak just does better, at least for now. ;)

7 - Once I'm happy with the clip codes, I do a preview render.

8- If I'm happy with the clip codes I'll go ahead and export at the highest resolution that I can to the Footage for Assembly folder.

Part B - Making The Cards

9 - I close out Premier Pro and launch Photoshop. I open the video that I exported to the Graphics Video folder and start going through it, extracting interesting stills as I come across them. These are saved in a sub folder tree in the Graphics Video folder: Stills > PSD. 

For my movement and behavior videos I like to use stills pulled from each video for the intro and outro cards. I think it makes the video a little more interesting, and I can have some fun setting the mood for the video, show aspects that I think are interesting about the animals that are in the video, etc. 

10 - I usually render way more stills than I'll need, so I'll go through and select which ones I want to use for the cards, then add the text. 

11 - Add the text to the cards. This is also some fun design work for me. I don't really have a standard style sheet for fonts for my cards, preferring to use different fonts that work with the different images on the cards. Once I'm happy with the look and lettering on the cards, I save them to the Footage Assembly folder.

When I save these, I save them using a standard naming protocol. The name includes the original name as well as what card it is. For instance, Lion 20200906-1-1-4 Channel Title would be the #4 still from the Lion 20200906-1-1 video, and it's the title card for the channel. That way, if I want to be able to pull the original still that that card was made from, I know where to find it. I also save all of the cards as PSD files with their layers intact. That way, if I need to alter the card in any way, it's already set up for that.

Part C - Assembly, Final Render, and Publishing

12 - Assemble the video elements. Easy enough in Premier Rush. Some might ask why I use Rush when I have Premier Pro. But I first started working in Rush, and for the simple things use it for, and given that it's already set up for me, I just go ahead and use it.

13 - Apply transitions.

14 - Render the assembled video to a folder titled Published Video in the main folder for the video.

15 - Publish to YouTube as a private video.

Part D - YouTube

16 - Write the Show Notes. I prefer to do this on YouTube. The dashboard is nice and roomy, I can see what I'm writing, etc. The show notes can be pretty long. They include instructions for requesting stills collections, a short description of that's in each clip, etc. I also add the tags. 

17 - Make the video public.

18 - Write a public comment and pin it.

19 - "Like" the video.

20- Share the video to Facebook. Eventually I'll also be sharing to Instagram.

Introduction And Welcome To My New Blog

 I've been interested in wildlife my entire life. Even when I was a little kid, my mom would find me in the family garden checking out the earth worms and other critters hiding under the foot boards. In grade school I fell in love with art, and in high school I combined my love of art with my love of the natural world and I've been creating wildlife art ever since. 

All of my flat work (drawings and paintings) are created from photographic reference. While I prefer to create my own reference material, I have been known to use photos from other people. This is especially true when I've done commission portrait work, and these types of reference photos are critical when doing memorial work. 

Often times, though, while the photograph was fine for pose, it lacked in other information, such as fine details (hair/feather/scale direction, hair whorl fine details, etc.). Back before the interned, I used to collect reference books on anatomy, calendars of wildlife, and coffee table style books of wildlife photos, some of which I still have in my private library. I also spent a lot of time at zoos and wild animal parks taking pictures, both for direct reference* and for detail/general reference.

As the years progressed, digital cameras and digital video became more commonplace and affordable, as did computers. I don't remember when I bought my first digital still camera, but it was shortly after I bought my first computer, way back in 2001 or 2002. I embraced digital media and set my film cameras (and all of their lenses) aside, but I never got rid of them, and last year I was able to buy a mirrorless camera and adapter. All of a sudden I once again had the ability to use my lenses. And, with modern software, I'm finally able to create the kind of reference material that I've been wanting for the past 40 years.

There are some advantages to shooting video as opposed to strictly stills for reference material, not the least of which is the ability to record not only animal movement, but also to record behavior. Wildlife art, even when done as a form of portraiture, is about conveying feelings even more than it is about scientific accuracy or realism (although those last two are critically important to me and the realistic styles that I like to work in). 

1 - Behavior helps me to better understand the species and the individual who I'm watching or portraying. As noted above, shooting video lets me see movement and behavior, but it also provides the context within which a certain pose can be understood. In other words, video provides visual "notes" to a session.

2 - Accuracy in portraying movement. If I'm working directly from a single photo, be it one that was extracted from a video or one that was originally shot as a still, I don't really need movement video unless the still is missing information. But, if I'm going to be working with a digital sculpt (mine or an asset produced by someone else), or I'm going to be working with real world clay, and I'm doing my own concept work, I need to know how the animal will be moving in a given situation. For instance, if I'm going to sculpt a bird taking off from a roost or perch, I need to know what that looks like. If I'm going to portray a seal doing anything, especially underwater, I need to know how that animal will be moving, and it's complicated. I recently shot video of the harbor seals at The Oregon Zoo, in my home town of Portland, Oregon, where I currently live. I have both the long version of the edited video and a shorter clip posted to my YouTube channel. In the long version the seals do a variety of things from hanging out on the bottom of their tank, to swimming and interacting. The short clip (taken from the long version) concentrates on the movements of two of the seals as they hover at the surface of the tank and move about. This video, shot from below the surface, shows how the seals use their limbs and bodies to move around, interact with each other, spin/turn around in the water while floating vertically in the water  column, and then how they dip below the surface, turn, and swim away. 

Their movements are so graceful and are spell binding. The movements of their limbs, in concert, are also fairly complicated, especially the rear limbs.One of the things I noticed, that I hadn't really noticed before, is that it's not just the rear flippers that the seal uses to move. The hips play an important role in this as well. Most of the movement actually starts at the hips and then migrates down to the flippers. Fascinating. And good to know if I'm going to sculpt or do a drawing that is strictly from my own imagination.

3 - Ideas/inspiration for new drawings, paintings, sculpture, etc.Video can provide me with inspiration and ideas, especially when animals do interesting things. And you never know what an animals is going to do. When I'm shooting video I really never know what I'm going to see when I'm around animals at liberty, and I see things that I never would have thought of.

4 - Better quality of motion capture in stills. This is a really interesting aspect of using video for reference as opposed to strictly shooting still photos. Back when I was using film SLR cameras, I got used to the lag time between when I pushed the shutter button and when the camera would actually expose the film. It's an incredibly short time, but anyone who's photographed a horse or other four legged animal in motion knows, there are only one or two split seconds in a given stride where the animal is balanced and doesn't look like it has one or more broken legs. I spent 3 years as a professional horse show photographer back in the early 1980s, and I got a lot of experience photographing horses in motion. I became pretty good, but still, I still had a lot of funky and unusable pictures. 

With good quality digital video, I can import it into Photoshop, and render it at a specific frame rate. For still collections, I like to render at 10 frames per second (the camera shoots at 29.9 FPS). That gives me around 3 frames per second, which is not only enough to create a set of stills similar to what Eadweard Muybridge was able to create for his motion studies, but also will often yield stills good enough to use as a direct reference for drawings and paintings. And I don't have to worry about that shutter lag. Even if I don't get a usable pose from the 3 FPS render, I can still render all frames in a small section of the video that I know the pose I want is in.

Also, that stills collection rendered at 10 FPS will give me the stills I need to really understand the animals movement and how the different limbs work in concert along with the animals body, ears, eyes, etc. depending on what I'm shooting the video of.

Anyway, I'm so glad to be creating all of this new reference material. I'm doing all of this for myself, but I'm also sharing it (both the video on YouTube and the stills collections) in the hopes that it helps other artists and also animators. I will not be charging for any of this, although I'll probably put up a donation button eventually to cover storage costs for the stills collections. I will probably also set up a FB page and use my Instagram account to post notices about new material added to the YouTube channel and stills collections to those files.

I'll be writing about all of these things and more in upcoming posts. But I think that's it for now.

*Direct reference is an image that I work directly from and reproduce in a drawing or painting. Most of the time, only the subject is used, and the lighting might be different, and the background (if there is one) will definitely be different, in the finished piece of art.