Poems by the Ocean

Poems by the Ocean

I have been in the throes of creating a series of short films featuring the poetry and dance of an amazing artist out of Australia, Jacinta Rose Durney. What I have always appreciated about Jacinta is her unwavering authenticity and individuality. She is such a grounded person, rooted in something more elemental and “Earthy” as opposed to the shiny distractions of global commercialism and endless marketing messages. Now, I realize that that description of her is kind of meaningless without context, but the moment you meet her, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Poems by the Ocean is a featurette of three of Jacinta’s poems, combined with amazing aerial footage of Newcastle Beach, shot on location in Australia by a wonderful photographer Joseph Dinh-Vu. Working on this piece has been really fulfilling because fusing the elements of poetry, dance, photography, film, and sound has been in and of itself an artistic process. Which is in stark contrast to the majority of corporate editing work that I do. There’s life to this, and it is special to see how all the elements have a new life and synergy when they come together. So I look forward to wrapping up this piece and sharing it soon. I’ll keep you posted.

And coincidentally, if you want to see 40 minutes of rotoscoping condensed into a 1 min time-lapse, I got you covered.

Rotoscoping has its origins in animation when animators would trace live-action film frame-by-frame onto animation sheets to give their animation more natural movement. But for motion designers and video editors rotoscoping is the technique of isolating an object or character out from a shot, typically when a green screen wasn’t used. Green screen makes the process so much easier. With a green screen, you just click the green bit and key out the background. 2 seconds and you’re done. But with rotoscoping you basically go frame by frame and trace the character you want to isolate out of the shot. It can be a very long and tedious process, but there are programs that make your life easier, namely Mocha Pro.

Here I wanted the titles to be behind Jacinta, so let’s rotoscope away for 40 mins for a shot that doesn’t even last a second and no one will ever realize the work that went into it. And that to me is the beauty of art.

Here rotoscope was used to make the boulder seem like it was passing in front of the titles.

- Dremaceo

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