Another Mime Background Experiment

Since my first little experiment regarding backgrounds for my mime short, I’ve done a few more, and I’ve noticed that my experiments have extended to the general look of the film. Recently I’ve been investigating the viability of playing around with Super 8 cine film, just for fun, so I decided to try applying a film effect to my next background test.

I drew the tree with pencil and overlaid some strokes with a brush pen. I scanned this drawing and laid it over an aged paper texture, after which I did a bit of fiddling with colours. As before, I stuck a pre-existing mime head over the top to see how it fits in with my intentions for the colouring of the character himself.
After I had finished all that, I applied a blur to the whole image to try to reproduce the slight blur of a low-gauge or old film, followed by a vertical-line film grain.
I actually have a bit of an uneasy feeling about simulating a film effect digitally. I’ve always criticised computer work that pretends to be something it’s not because I always prefer to see the real thing. For example I really dislike CG that pretends to be stop-motion animation. I see what I’ve done here as a bit like that – ease of creation at the expense of honesty. Why I feel so strongly about the matter is beyond me, but there we are! That said, I don’t currently have the knowhow to be able to create my short on actual film. Plus I’d have to mess around with cels.
Anyway I’m not quite there yet with the background, but I’ve got a bit more of a clear idea of what I want a whole film frame to look like now, so that’s good at least.