There are morph programs out there. Shoot the arm infront of a greenscreen, establish the 2d arm in the same position. Morph between the two shots and then plop in a background and whoop sound effect.

RJSchwarz

well i dont want a phase... I want it to like start at his finger, and slowly creep up his arm, while hes moving...

You can export your footage to frame by frame and then use photoshop to update each frame as the animation progresses. I'm sure there are probably more elegant solutions but I don't know them.

RJSchwarz

Hmm, I think I know exactly what you're talking about.

A couple of things that come to mind:

Frame by frame is the option that will guarantee the success of your effect, but depending on the length of the shot it could take seemingly forever to finish it. If you did go this route however, I would suggest you import the source video into Flash and start drawing the cartoon substitute overtop. Keeps things in the realm of your experience, and makes for simple exporting and compositing later on.

Hm, what else. Okay, well if you were generating a cell shaded effect (like the rotoscopped cell shading in A Scanner Darkly) using the original footage I would try duplicating the source onto another layer and making a mask surrounding your subject (so you have a layer with just the person, and then the whole source footage underneath). Then apply your cell shading "cartoon" effect to the upper layer. Now, reshape the mask so that it initially only shows the tip of his finger, then go through frame by frame (or with keyframes) and gradually expand the mask through the subject's figure as you see fit.

Make sense? I've never tried the hypothetical effect I've just described, so the workflow might be a bit off but it might be worth a shot.

yeah I thought about the frame by frame route, the only problem is the amount of time it would take... anyway, i guess I'm going that route, so what's the easiest way to export the frames of a movie as a sequence of images that I can import into flash?

That would depend upon your editing program I suspect. FCP has an export to Frame by Frame deal built in. I suspect Premier does as well. Not sure about the less expensive software.

Another option is to create a plate with just the background and use that as the background for the animated scene. Then lay that scene beneath the live footage scene and use a matte to slowly dissolve away one in favor of the other. If the backgrounds match and the figures are positioned correctly it could work.

RJSchwarz