animated drawing

[dooley]

Can anyone give me some insight into creating a "video" of lines appearing on screen and becoming a drawing? I've searched the forums, and was somewhat suprised that I didn't find anything. I may not have used the correct search terms.
The example that I saw was on a video from Prestonwood Baptist church in Texas. I had a friend tell me that they did not do their video in-house, but had it done by an outside company. I'm hoping to do this for use in our Christmas program, so I do have some time to get it done.
Thanks for any help.

[tedanderson]

The only way that I know of doing this (cheaply and easily and time consuming) is to use a wipe effect.

Like in the case of a house, I scanned a pencil-sketched drawing and then I edited it into 3 different pictures: One with only horizontal lines (by erasing everything else), one with vertical lines, and then one that only displayed the curves, circles and odd shaped items. Then I chroma-keyed the 3 images over a yellow background making them all wipe diagonally in different directions at different speeds so it appeared as if the lines were "growing" across the screen. To add to that, I used a slow zoom and a 3D effect that cause the "self-drawing" image to tilt from lying flat to the full upright position.

[Sysmom]

Are you talking about what the video bloggers are calling "speed painting" or actually lines which move around the canvas to become a drawing and/or full blown image?

The latter is a serious piece of animation. I'm not up on video plug-ins at all to tell you if there might be one that could help you. Rev_65 or Joey might know that.

Ted's got a great idea on how to get the effect, though!

There's an awesome painting in progress at Igniter Media of "The Last Painting" which was done by the 'Jesus Painter', too.

deb

[brenthomer]

While I would have to go online to find a tutorial if I did it, I know how its done. The line needs tobe a .eps or .ai vector. It needs to be simple enough that it can be followed. Then in AE or Motion you can have a particle effect trace the line. You set the particles to never decay and then that makes the particles turn into a line. Its pretty cool, and you can do it without any plug-ins with motion or AE.

[Sysmom]

Oooh, so cool. It just takes time, hmmm?

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by Sysmom

Oooh, so cool. It just takes time, hmmm?

Personally, I'd animate a null object over the iamge, then import the paths into Particle Illusion, and use the pencil preset in there.

VERY time consuming

[tedanderson]

Or if you would like to make the task even more daunting, just erase the image little by little saving each change as a separate file and then assembling them all as a film-strip.

[LeAnn B]

What about drawing it yourself and record it with a screen capture program like Wondershare Democreator

[dooley]

Thank you all very much for your responses. I think I'm going to try to do something in AE, although I am just beginning to use it, so it will be even slower going.

[rev_65]

Actually it's a pretty easy job to do in AE with a little pre-planning. AE will animate a stroke along any number a paths - either in order or simultaneously. I'd use the pen tool in Illustrator to draw what I wanted then import that into AE. The real trick is keep all your strokes open - no closed shapes.

[rharlow]

check out drawinghand.com