So, Ben has to walk across the screen. Not too complicated, right? I just tell him what to do, he does it while I'm filming, I pull the video onto my computer, and somehow I then get him into Flash, all animated. Heh. Let's see.. After shooting sixteen minutes of Ben trudging back and forth across the designated area (I don't think he had my artistic "vision" in mind) I finally managed to capture something that looked like it might work.

At this point, disheartened but still hopeful, I connected my camera to my computer and captured all 3.5 gigabytes to my hard drive so I could attempt to find just the right shot for his website. The very last take ended up being perfect for the project, so I proceeded to get it ready to go.

First, I changed the video frame rate to 4 FPS and saved it out as a Quicktime. I then imported it into Flash and exported those 38 frames as a .BMP sequence, so I could do some batch contrast/filtering in Photoshop. After the individual images were all "up to spec" I imported them into ImageReady and saved them as an animated .GIF.

I had no bright blue chroma screen available to shoot him in front of, so we shot him in front of a solid white wall. This is an important thing to consider at this point because it was precisely at this point that I had to manually remove the background from every frame. (Good thing I changed it to 4 FPS from the original 60 FPS!)