Storyboards
Sometimes we'll place initial style frames within the drawn storyboards so our clients can see how they relate to the story and structure.
Style frames can often have quite an impact on the narrative so when crafting a film, we’ll usually try and do both boards and visuals in unison.
Style Frames
Usually our director [ in this case our CD Simon ] will have a strong idea in their head as to what they wants it to look like. But that still requires lots of play and experimentation. Here we can see that we’ve moved away from the originally more illustrative figures to the stick man as we decided to make the packages the hero of the story. Eventually we decided to also keep the environment simpler – going with the well know brown paper parcel packaging.
Character Animation Tests
Before we commit to weeks of animation, we need to check our idea – in this case compositing 2D animated characters with fully 3D packaging, works well in both visual and motion. Here we can see this was done before we changed our figures to the stick man aesthetic.
Rigging
We used the rubber hose plug in in aftereffects to rig the character. Using A LOT of duplicated and parented layers we could alpha our various shapes to create the shadows, shade and little details that gave our figures just that little bit more depth.
Facial animation was done the good ole fashioned [ ish ] way by animating the Bezier lines within the head shape using tweening.
Compositing
Lastly, we put it all together. The 3D scenes were animated first, before being rendered out with various light and texture passes. Then the 2D figures were comped in and animated before all the finishing touches were added to bring it all to life and glue the carious elements together.
If you liked this then have a look at the full film...
