Aha 'Take On Me' Effect

Beginners
1

Hello! I am new to Touch Designer and am interested in using it to create videos to showcase some of my music compositions. Here is a link to my first video:

For this video, I used a series of Keyboard In Chops to affect the parameters of various Tops (mostly Mirror, Comp, etc). This allowed me to change the background color and image rotation/direction in real time while I recorded the video directly out of Touch Designer. So fun! For the source video, I edited together several shots of me playing instruments against a homemade green screen along with other elements I found visually interesting. Prior to being edited together, I processed the shots in After Effects to create that classic A-ha ‘Take On Me’ music video hand drawn/rotoscope effect. For this, I relied heavily on the following After Effects tutorial:

I like the look I was able to achieve, but would love to be able to recreate this type of effect entirely in Touch Designer instead. So, my question is: What would be the best way to approach making this type of effect?

In a nutshell, the After Effects tutorial linked above basically breaks down the process into the following steps:

  1. Key out green screen then convert video into 3 distinct tones: black, white, and gray
  2. Replace each individual tone with an animated ‘scribbly pencil’ effect
  3. Another larger layer of animated ’squiggles’ is overlayed on top that masks out and alters the look from step 2 (this step is not super important for me right now).

So, what would be the most efficient way to convert my video to black, white, and gray and then use pre-made scribble animations to overlay onto each distinct tone? My approach so far has been to use 3 distinct paths of RGB Key TOP> Monochrome TOP>Level TOP to convert to black, white, and gray. Then, in theory, I should be able to use a pre-made ‘squiggly line’ animation to composite each of those with a Comp TOP. Then, finally, composite them all back together again. However, I am having trouble being able to separate the video into 3 distinct tones by simply using the Level TOP. Are there any tricks to achieve this? Is there anything I am missing or does this seem like a sensible approach?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

2

Hey @Ryanemc,

after keying the background and turning it into a monochrome image you could use the RGB Key TOP or Chroma Key TOP. For the RGB Key start setting the Red Min and Red Max parameters thirds. Equally if you are using a Chroma Key TOP, set the Val Min and Val Max parameters.

Now important is to also change the output settings - this is the same for either TOP: On the TOP parameter’s “Output” page, change the RGB Output to “New Alpha” and the Alpha Output to “Source Alpha * New Alpha”.

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Hope this helps
cheers
Markus

3

This solution seems to work great. Thank you for your help!