I just got a cel from My neighbour Totoro and it didn't come with a (matching) background.
So I decided to make one myself and since (I think) that it worked out really well I decided to share with you how I made it....
First I browsed the DVD for the scene that my cel is featured in and I took a lot of different screenshots.
After that I opened 1 of the screenshots in Photoshop and I added the other ones on top of it all as a separate layer.
Because the characters move in the scene the different screenshots together all show and hide different parts of the background.
From all the screenshots that I laid on top of the 1st screenshot I erased the characters. This is not the most fun thing to do and it took
me about an hour for 10 screenshots which isn't that bad.
At the end I was left with an image of the background with still a couple of very small parts of the characters visible.
To get rid of those parts I copied parts of the background that were similar to the blocked parts and pasted them over the charcter parts.
If you use the lasso tool to select areas of the image and give this lasso a "feather" of about 10 to 20 pixles then the cut out part won't have hard edges and
then you won't notice that it's been cut out.
When I was all done I was left with a pretty clean background but at a low resolution. Something like 785x435 which will look very crappy when you print it at
the actual cel size.
To scale the image to a printable size I used the Photoshop plugin called pxlSmartScale 1.0.
This allowed me to scale the image up from 785x435 to something like 6000x4000 which was the size I needed to print.
This plugin does magic and enhances and sharpens everything to the point where you cannot tell anymore that it used to be a small image. It's a commercial plugin though that doesn't come with Photoshop. But maybe you know somebody who is a graphic artist who uses it or has it at work..
Now this works out different for every cel and scene. I was lucky that in "my" scene the characters staid in one place but moved around quite a bit so that at one time or the other they would reveal different parts of the background.
But if you cannot remove all the character parts from the background the chance is big that your cel will block these parts. So if you have to do some "cutting & pasting" then most it won't be visible.
I have uploaded this background to the background section of Rubberslug under the name "Totoro BG 1". Here a link:
http://www.rubberslug.com/resource/mod_sharebg_details.aspx?i=196
I had to lower the resolution and compress it quite a bit to make it fit the 700kb limit but it does print very nice.
Here a link to a higher res scan of the cel (1024x700, 210kb):
http://www.xs4all.nl/~tetsuo/wip/totoro-cel-1_highres.jpg
