Author Archive
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.
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META BOARDS:: ::
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Hey all, Dominic Vivona, production director here for this installment of The Atomic Robo blog.
This blog will deal with a little bit of concept work and also a thing we like to call, “Meta Keys”. After the script had been written and before we went to the storyboards/animatic, I talked with our director to see what he thought about doing a pre-visualization to the pre-visualization. A sort of overview of the entire short to give us a very loose working visual guide before we had each scene broken down into storyboards. We found these “Meta Keys” a lot of fun and very useful as we could eliminate and keep panels before launching into the more detailed storyboards. Since the last few blogs have dealt with character concept and storyboards, the images that we will show here will deal with the same subject matter plus an additional peak for all of you who might be chomping at the bit to see more of our vision of the animated Atomic Robo.
Don’t mind the censored panels on the Meta Keys. Our intrepid director will free up what we all can see as the animation keeps truckin’ on to ultimate Robo animated glory. Cheers!
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JEFE, WOULD YOU SAY I HAVE A PLETHORA OF ROBO’S? :: ::
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
One of the great pleasures, and frustrations, of character design is the process. For this project, we had the privilege of already having half of our work cut out for us. Series artist on Atomic Robo, Scott Wegener, has created a character design that is instantly ready for animation. Still, whenever you attempt to bring a character to life through traditional animation, the team must have a fully realized and comprehensibly understood character model. Even with the beautifully iconic and streamlined Robo illustrated for us through two graphic novels, we had to come to a place where the scale, mass and the angles of every aspect of Robo were understood. This turned out to be a fun process but much longer than we originally thought.
In my own expirience with comic illustration, I never realized how much I have the tendency to go “off model” to enhance and stylize a character in any given panel to emphasize the action that is going on in the page. When reading a comic book, the reader fills in the action between panels allowing the artist to take more risks or leaps of faith with the understanding that the reader will take his cue and mentally “see” what is never actually drawn. With animation the same effects can be achieved but there is a narrower margin for error. With this in mind the team needs a solid charcter model that can always be referenced before altering any shot to achieve a desired effect.
Overall, The process was a blast and we came up with an Atomic Robo that we believe will be true to Scott’s vision.
Included in this post are a few samples of the evolution of Atomic Robo from sketchbook to character model sheet, to the finished color pass. Cheers!
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