Thin Blue Line

The only problem I've come across with scanning rather than photographing every frame in a hand-drawn animation is that occasionally there are mysterious digital blue lines that appear in your scans and ruin everything by cropping up uninvited across a vital piece of imagery and distracting your viewer. Not fun. 

I tried keying out the lines - doesn't work when the line is blue, and your colour scheme is blue and pink. Do you sacrifice approximately half your images by keying out a thin blue line? No, of course not. Game over. Try again next time. 

I tried spot healing the scans frame by frame in photoshop which took hours but then created what a friend labelled the effect of 'a trickle of rain going down the screen'. Also not acceptable, in fact I thought this was more distracting than simply having the line in it. There was also a weird effect of the screen moving and changing perspective despite no other changes being made to the film. Back to the start and don't pass go. 

Finally I had a little play around with the values in the basic wire line removal tool in After Effects, which I presume is normally used by puppeteers to remove fishing lines in their films. This worked a trick after a few tweaks. Huzzahh! 

I left some of the softer, more subtle lines in at this stage because I thought they added a bit of texture to the film (maybe I'd grown fond of the little buggers), in the same way some of the little black specks do. Although not to everyone's taste, I like features like these because they remind you it's been made by hand and not in a digital environment. There are digital animators who actively try to emulate these effects to make their work look more 'real'. Scanning also flattens everything down and you tend to lose the paper texture working this way, so it's nice to have a bit of real life texture in the film in these little touches.