Process Dump Pt. 1

I know I have been slacking on my Medium posts, which is an understatement. Typically, posting on here helps me get my thoughts out, but once I had a finished script and plan of action, I needed to dedicate all my time to animating. So for the next few posts, I will be dumping all my process.

First thing I will be showing is the character animation process. I knew I would be rotoscoping over live footage and that the style had to be very simple to save time. So i constrained the character design to have: no shading, limited contour lines, and excluding facial expressions when character was at a distance or not the focus of the shot (this last constraint also had the dual-purpose of letting the viewer attach themselves to the character).

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ml-T7cywZM0dIBDsPaJbjyVF9FJ_2rfP?usp=sharing

Here are some time-lapse videos of the process. I’m so happy that Procreate captures this automatically because I wouldn’t have thought to record it myself. The process was basically that I just took a video of my awesome model, dropped that video into after effects over my shot, export those frames and open them in procreate, traced each frame, then exported those drawings back into after effects. For shots that had no real change in physical appearance asside from changing position or scale, I simply traced a single image, then animated the postition and scale in after effects, also adding a cross-displacement turbulence to kind of fake a frame by frame look.