CSEP 576 Project - Intelligent Scissors

Shahid Razzaq

It was 60 degrees outside, deep into the month of January.  My mind was a blur ... "how come its so warm this time of the year" ... each passing day had brought endless amount of rain on the snowy cascade slopes ... the powder as we knew it was being was washed away.  I had to do something ... something quick ... i needed that dose.  Suddenly i found myself saying .... "Honey, Where did you put the scissors ..."

Result:

Ok, so i meant to ask for iscissors not just scissors.

I admit, i ain't that good at snowboarding but a little imagination didn't hurt.

I used GIMP software for the project.  After some initial attempts on the floor ... i shifted to the bedroom.  Wife was the photographer:

And the mask:

Had to shoot at different angles so that i could snow myself looping in the air:

Some masks were tricky as i could not tell my program to mask out specific parts, e.g the region between the legs could not be captured and iscissors thought that i wanted to mask that region and not the body around it.  How did i work around it? Well had to sneak in from around where the bindings are ... had to cut my livewire in and then trace out the internal leg region and then out the same route and then all around the body.  As you can see, you can't make out from the mask below that it really happened.

Yeah my board needs waxing.

Again had to do the same trick.  I had some lee-way in terms of being able to rotate the image in GIMP, so i wasn't very particular about the turning angles.

And the mask:

I gave the affect of distance by scaling the images as i applied them to the panorama.  Assuming that the guy shooting the jump scene was right along the highest point in the jumpers trajectory.  So the following image which corresponds to the highest position is relatively bigger (scaled down less)

The final descent ... i know it looks like i am taking off but once you rotate, the context of the picture makes it look like i'm landing.

Here's the final image again.  You will see some paintbrush work in the background, that was to remove traces of the previous snowboarder who prowled the slopes (done prior to applying the masks)