Snow Leopard Wall Jumping in Portal

I decided to make my first snow leopard video sticker something fun, like I did with the snow leopard tail chain sticker for the vector-animated snow leopard sticker pack. A video of a snow leopard performing crazy wall jumping to get one meter down seemed like a great source.

Unfortunately, the source was an ancient video of atrocious quality (240x320 at 15 fps, to be precise, with tiny Telegram stickers being 512x512, for reference), with most reposts being a pixelated upscaled mess. So...

1. I removed duplicate frames using FFMPEG and presereved original frame numbers.

2. I upscaled the video 2x with Topaz's Proteus-3 model. This looked somewhat better than the standard bicubic upscale. 4x upscale caused too heavy artifacting with little to no details, so I kept 2x. At this point I wasn't sure how many frames will be needed, so the length was about 283 frames.

3. I cleaned up the artifacts in Photoshop by going frame by frame. It mostly involved blurring the parts where the neural network found too many fake details compared to the surrounding area.

4. I time-interpolated the video 2x with Topaz's Chronos-2 model. The source was 15 fps, so this got me to kind of 30 fps. "Kind of", because the source wasn't pure 15 fps and interpolation created several unusable frames too.

5. I cleaned up the interpolated frames in Photoshop. Removed unusable frames, fixed the fixable frames.

6. I've already created an app for producing correct VFR (variable frame rate) input data from messy sources like this, with dropped frames both before and after time interpolation, so after a few commands, I got the video in somewhat decent quality. Decent enough for a sticker that is.

7. I started experimenting with the video in After Effects and decided to just overlay the video several times to get a cycle. The original ending involved the snow leopard exiting the frame on the bottom.

8. I started working on creating transparency channel for the frames in Photoshop. The source was still such a mess that no remotely automatic tool could guess the mask, so I had to start drawing masks for each image frame by frame.

9. After 2 days of drawing around 160 masks with mouse, it became apparent that getting to the last 320-th frame would be too much work with little value, as most of the frames would be mostly obscured by each other. I got to the 180-th frame, where the most active movement stops, fixed masks to the best of my ability, added half-transparent pixels in fast-movement frame... and started thinking. Wall jumping in Portal came to my mind. After sketching up walls in Photoshop, I loaded the video into After Effects and added a sketch of cycled animation with walls, buttons and a box.

10. I started 3ds Max and started modeling walls. Wall textures of Portal came from the generous Internet, same with the box model. Walls themselves, buttons, mechanisms etc. were modeled by me from scratch. I tried to complete the project in 3ds Max, but it became apparent that I can't get transparency of the snow leopard video to work properly (now that I think about it, I could try converting PNGs with with non-premultiplied alpha to premultiplied alpha which 3ds Max likely expects), so I exported just the background part to a separate video with alpha transparency.

11. Back in After Effects, I overlayed the videos. It mostly involved masking of the snow leopard jumping video. I rendered the video to Prores.

12. After 10-20 tries I found the combination of quality arguments for my fork of FFMPEG (with separate CRF for color and alpha in LibVPx-VP9 and removed optional WebM/Matroska metadata) that got me close to the 256 KB sticker limit.

13. I uploaded the sticker to Telegram using the official bot.

And that's folks how you spend almost a week animating a single sticker.