ANATOMY OF A SCENE 01 – COMPOSITING ::

Friday, February 26th, 2010

How do I best put this…. Producing Animation is hard. Really hard. A tremendous amount of time, talent, and resources go in to each frame of Atomic Robo: Last Stop. Having said that, it’s also a blast! We get to draw AND talk about nerdy stuff all day.

This week the team convinced me to post a small snippet of the animation as it exists right now. So here’s the process to get to the video. Those of you with short attention spans might want to tune out about now…

I sit down with my creative team, Jeff McComsey and Dominic Vivona. And we take a look at our script written by Brian Clevinger and your’s truly.
Step 01: From discussions on the script, I tell the guys where I would like our “camera” placed. On of the things that’s special about the Fictory Method, is that we treat animation like live action when preparing a shot.
Step 02: Jacked up on coffee, Jeff creates a storyboard based on our discussion. From here I approve the shot or we go back to the drawing board (literally) until  it’s up to snuff.
Step 03: I take the completed board and create an animatic. The animatic is cut to the exact timing and framing for the shot.
Step 04: Dom and I start war gaming the actual animation, acting out the scene and  roughing the animation. Jeff and I discuss background color feel and scale, he gets to work.
Step 05: Jeff creates the finished pencil and we hand over Dom’s key frame animation to our tweeners (in between animators). In the meantime I create a rough composite with the resources available.
Step 06: Tweens are finished, animation is  approved and colored, and backgrounds renders are completed.
Step 07: I take everything, bring it into the computer and put the stank-on-it. After fiddling with some knobs and pressing my computer’s animate button, the rough composite is dropped into our final film timeline.

Whew, thanks for bearing with me through all that. That’s just a small part of the processes we go through to bring you a sweet ass animation. Please enjoy a few seconds of the posted clip! Keep in mind this is NOT a finished shot. Just a rough composite.

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ANATOMY OF A SCENE 02 – TRADITIONAL ANIMATION:: ::

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Hey all, Production Director, Dominic Vivona here for our next installment of gross anatomy 101 animation style.

Once our animatics and backgrounds are completed for any given scene we go directly into working the key frames. To establish a well grounded character we need to have a solid idea of what environment our action will be taking place in. Key frames can begin as soon as we have this understanding so here we are going to show the key frames laid on top of the first element of the background (the background continues to grow with elements for the mid-ground, foreground, color, etc.). After we are finished with key frames the ball moves steadily along to “tweening” and coloring all of the frames. Then on to compositing (stay tuned for the next post!).

As I’m sure you noticed, Robo seems to be missing something from his ever lovin’ hands. Not to fear Atomic Robo writer, Brian Clevinger, sent us over a great pick on what type of gun Robo should be wielding in this here our little moving picture project. I must say, it’s a perfect fit. In some scenes we composite in elements rather than draw them together. As is the case for this scene, we rendered the gun separately. Here is the concept for said hand canon.

Posted in Atomic Robo: Last Stop, Education, Fictory Production Blog | No Comments »

ANATOMY OF A SCENE 01 – BACKGROUNDS:: ::

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

This week we’ll be showing more or less what goes into a scene from boards to finish. My first job is to generate storyboards that we use to map out the short. Some shots are taken from the boards verbatim and some evolve a bit as the production goes on. After my boards are composited into the animatic I move on to generating  line art for the still backgrounds and finally the colored version that will appear in the short. Here’s shot 20 from boards to backgrounds.

Stay tuned throughout the week because next we’re showing Dominic’s key animation frames and process and THEN on Friday we’ll show a few seconds of shot 20 FULLY ANIMATED in glorious Technicolor!

-Jeff McComsey

Posted in Atomic Robo: Last Stop, Education, Fictory Production Blog | 1 Comment »