We transform the movie of an actor into an animated drawing using the texture we prefer: pencil, paint, markers, we can make it with GIMP. Then, thanks to Kdenlive, the texture can be applied to the actor’s silhouette.
When making a music video, you often look for less obvious effects. The most classic example is drawings: transforming the singer (or any other subject) into a drawing, possibly animated. One option is to make a real cartoon by drawing the character by hand and animating it. But it is obviously uncomfortable, because to be able to have a realistic result you have to be quite good at drawing and create many frames in order to prevent the animation from jerking. The simplest thing is to turn a movie into a drawing, just as you can do it with a simple photograph. The technique to be exploited is matte painting, but on the contrary: the classic matte painting provides that a background is added in superimposition to the images filmed thanks to a silhouette (usually obtained on the basis of its brightness, in GIMP you can create level masks editing them manually). In this case, on the other hand, you want to make a certain texture visible using the film made with an actor as a layer mask. The texture must represent the classic filling of the drawings: it can be a rectangle colored with pencils, with tempera, markers, chalk, or spray paint. Of course, these textures can also be digitally created with GIMP, even using unusual motifs (tree bark or stone). For example, you can draw spots on the image, as if you were spraying spray paint, and then only make the silhouette of the actor visible, to give the illusion that the actor himself was actually drawn with the spray paint. The trick we will use is to draw the texture with GIMP and then create multiple versions, to be joined as frames in a sequence. This will allow us to have a variable and not fixed texture, which otherwise might seem a bit forced as a thing. In fact, the more the texture changes, the more realistic the design will look, because when making a cartoon by hand coloring it is inevitable that the texture will always be different in each frame. Then, with Kdenlive, you can take a green screen clip of the actor starring in the movie and remove the green background, using the classic chromatic key. Kdenlive then offers the possibility of creating matte painting with a transition, making the texture visible, on a background, only through the silhouette of the actor cleaned from the green cloth. The matte painting used in this way is very efficient even if you are using it as the texture of the normal graphite pencil, because you can take advantage of the whole brightness range of the shots, and therefore make the graphite appear darker and lighter in different areas of the image just like when making a real pencil drawing. To achieve this result, you do not need to binarize the actor’s video (thus making it appear only black or white), but you can play with contrast and brightness to get all the gray scale you want, just like in the GIMP level masks. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=natRNx5_nJE
How to illuminate the green screen
This effect is played with lights and shadows: since we generally work with the image in negative, everything that is highlighted during the shooting will disappear, while what is in shadow will be represented with the texture that we have prepared. This means that to clearly distinguish the details of the actor it is advisable to use a grazing light. The ideal is, for example, to illuminate the face well but not the eyes, which will therefore become visible after applying the effect. To prevent the folds of the green cloth from being too prominent, it can be illuminated with an additional lamp that hits it directly and from above, to erase any shadows cast on it.
Prepare the texture
With GIMP you can design your own texture


Animate the texture
A realistic texture for an animated drawing must change constantly




The various clips in the right order
The actor’s clip must be positioned above the one with the texture




Cut out the texture
We use the clip with the actor as a layer mask for the texture



