45. Bones

I finally got around shooting the skeleton shots (some of them anyway.) Now you may wonder how do i rotoscop a skeleton??

Well it's not easy... So I built a "Skeleton Costume" and I start from there and draw all the missing bits (bones really) the old way :)

The roto is SO painful, but drawing the spine and all the other thing is pretty fun. I'm saying that probably because I'm still doing the first shot.

Here is the test animation I made, to make sure that the suit worked... It's not part of the film. I'm including the live footage, because let's face it, it's pretty stupide.

Walking skeleton

Here in HD on vimeo 

42. Same old, Same old

Damn, I've been dead busy with playing fancy dressing and drinking (for the live action of the film, obviously - well mainly) that I forgot to post last week! Anyway there is much more black on the character now, and shading takes twice longer... If you want to start a 2d film, hand drawn, here's an advice, make everything white! Damn that black T-Shirt is killing me.

So you can forgive me, here's a little GIF, the walking drunk (it's not the shot that caused me lots of pain):

Walking

36. Live action, Again

I finished animating all the shots I filmed so far, so I'm back on live action. I have a few "classic" shot to shoot, i.e. me going around in my living room pretending to be in the desert, but after that I'll start the more complex shots, involving old fashion special effects such as building a fake head in latex. Ho boy that's gonna be fun!

Here, a mock up layout of one of the shots I film yesterday:

Drunk

And just a little reminder that the kickstarter is still going! (9 days left!)

7. Time-lapse and Animation test.

Exciting post today as I finally have a drawing that will appear in the final film! I finished a first background and did a little animation test last week.

Here is me drawing the BG:

[vimeo 44107554 w=500 h=375]

I have to animate up to 6 minutes of animation in a very short time,

this is equivalent of 4320 drawings in pencils and 4320 in pen...

Lets say A LOT. To be on schedule I had to find a quick method to animate.

Since I'm not a proper animator it needed to be easy enough and reliable.

The obvious choise was rotoscoping, i.e. Drawing on top of video.

The problem with this technic, is that it doesn't feel right, you're missing the artist interpretation.

I decided to tweak this technic. I needed the Rotoscop to be able to draw easily, not to guide the movement,  i needed only the poses and not the timings.

So this is what I do:

I film the subject in slow motion (this is usually me moving slowly), with very specific poses.

Then I re-time the animation by keeping only the frames that are relevent to the animation I want.

Giving you a video close to Pixilation. But with the ability to film it on your own (quite important in my case)

Finally I trace the drawing on top of the video.

Here is the result, obviously a drunk skeleton:

[vimeo 44118553 w=500 h=281]

This week plan is to start the bigest BGs, and maybe animate a background animation to a final state.