and the whatnot of sorts

Thanks for watching!  Following is a little making-of for the film– read on if you’re interested

I wanted to have a project to try some new After Effects (AE) things and also to get some overall experience– and to stay enthusiastic and all that too– it ended up being a short film based on a single panel sketch I did a few years ago:

The short was done on a pretty fast schedule– about 1.5 months while working on a few freelance projects.  There’s a fair bit of re-use…

Some of the storyboards:

I also wanted to mess around with fast cutting.  The average scene length is 3 seconds ( for comparison: my previous fastest was 5 ).  To have things make sense ( hopefully make sense :D) there had to be an emphasis on that old “every shot is an extreme closeup of what you’re supposed to see” sort of thing.

Following is just a rundown of the scenes.  Notes added where I think they might be of interest.

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sc1 ( Toon Boom )

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sc2 ( Flash )

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sc3 ( Flash )

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sc4 ( Flash )

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sc5 ( Flash )

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sc6 ( Flash )

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sc7 ( re-use sc2, Flash )

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sc8 ( stop motion, After Effects, Toon Boom )

I put together a styrofoam model of the car– unfortunately I only had that rubbery/springy styrofoam lying around which wasn’t all that great to work with… ( if you know of any specific materials that work nicely, please let me know! )  Wishful thinking mostly held the car together but glue and some toothpicks helped also.  Then I used Maya to mock up the animation and figure out which photos of the styrofoam model were needed– took those photos in front of a green screen ( $3 matte green cloth from a store ) and animated them in After Effects.  Spinning wheels were added too and a couple other little touches.

If the animation was going to be much more difficult, there’s another option:

1. Take a *bunch* of photos of the styrofoam model from all different angles.
2. Bring those photos into After Effects, and have the “car layer” choose which photo to display based on that layer’s position relative to the camera.  It uses a bit of trigonometry ( meh… ), but it’s pretty cool to animate real-life objects like they’re 3d models.  Here’s a quick test I did to try it out (1.1 mB )

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sc9

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sc10 ( Flash, After Effects )

Car from sc2 added to the cop’s sunglasses– AE’s Spherize used in each sunglass(?) to distort the image slightly.

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sc11 ( After Effects, stop motion )

Took a bunch of pictures of my gloved hand in various poses in front of the green screen.  Animated the hand in After Effects and then animated the sleeve to the hand using the puppet tool.

Used “TV Sing Along With Mitch” for the record.  I tried to shoot photos of it inside, but wow are those things reflective… so we went outside, where it was starting to rain.  You can’t really see it easily but there are raindrops on the record as it spins ( and it still sounds pretty good! )

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sc12 ( After Effects )

( click here for the cover )

Grunged up the cover a bit in Photoshop.  A displacement map is used to distort the album when the hand enters.

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sc13 ( re-use sc11 )

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sc14 ( re-use sc10 )

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sc15 ( Toon Boom )

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sc16 ( Toon Boom )

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sc17 ( Flash, After Effects )

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sc18 ( Flash )

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sc19 ( Flash, After Effects )

( The ticket the cop flashes here is an earlier draft of the one that shows in the next scene )

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sc20 ( After Effects )

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sc21 ( Toon Boom )

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sc22 ( Toon Boom )

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sc23 ( Flash )

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sc24 ( After Effects )

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sc25 ( Toon Boom )

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sc26 ( Flash )

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sc27 ( Flash )

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sc28 ( Flash )

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sc29 ( Toon Boom )

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sc30 ( Flash, Toon Boom, After Effects )

Crowd and mayor ( guy on left ) are from Flash.  Hand-shaking animated in Toon Boom– there’s a nice reference video for that one.

I don’t have much experience with the AE particle plugins but that’s what made the confetti.  To get the variety of colors, I put the particle generator on top of a rectangle that had a 4-color gradient.  Each piece of confetti, upon birth at some random spot on the colorful rectangle, would sample the color that was behind it… and then fall and the like, kinda sortish like confetti.

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sc31 ( Flash )

( my favorite crowd member, near the left edge )

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sc32 ( Flash )

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sc33 ( Flash, Toon Boom, After Effects )

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history

I don’t stand behind the accuracy of this information.  It is correct if my sources can be trusted, and they all look like they plagiarized the words from the same spot.  So… I don’t stand behind the facts but, maybe, I stand nearby– like to the side a little seems nice.

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Ok– credits and all that.  Thanks again to FreeMusicArchive and TheFreeSoundProject and all the people there who contribute– it was great hearing from some of you already– super thanks!

Thanks also to my family!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I’ll try to get back.  And, lastly, thanks for watching/reading!