Rotascoping fun!

I've been working solidly over the past few weeks on a moving image piece for my final MA show in July. I've been working in AfterEffects which was a new software for me so the initial learning curve was more of a learning vertical! It took me a while to get my head around the concept of the 'z' space, the third dimension as it were. I've gotten a handle on it now and it's all coming together. Now that I've got the basic structure and movement of the animation I've been investigating ways of adding detail and interest by introducing other techniques. The animation is primarily illustrated but I'm keen to overlay elements of video into the piece. When I'm mixing media in this way it's important that two elements gel together and there isn't an obvious clash. I used rotascoping to better integrate the video into the illustrated environment. I found this process extremely time consuming and rather tedious. It involved exporting the 12 seconds of video as a film strip at 15 frames per second. This essentially created a stop motion animation (of 180 frames) in photoshop which were each drawn over individually. I was surprised i didn't have repetitive strain after it! This image is a section of the film strip. Despite the labour intensiveness it was useful technique to learn for future reference.