About the Animation

This blog is a development diary of my scholarly thesis for Institute of Design, Lahti, Finland.

My aim is to make an animation within these circumstances :

Length : 5-6 minutes
Method : Pixilation (stop motion with people) mixed with 2D compositing softwares & 3D animation.

Secondary interests are to see how good quality one man can basically achieve with inexpensive tools and within a short timetable. Inspiration for this idea was an animated short-film Kaze the Ghost Warrior :

It was produced by a one man in 6 months with 2 computers.

I knew I couldn’t model, rig and animate 3d-characters for animation plus make all backgrounds within 4 months so I was going to shoot live footage in green screen studio and make it look rotoscoped or something similar. After discussing with Pekka Veikkolainen, I wanted to try his suggestion to shoot the actors with my a DSLR-camera (Watch the test). The tests looked very promising. This method is actually called pixilation, which is, shooting people in stop motion, frame by frame. They did that also a lot in Prague during my exchange period, so influence was already there.

By doing this, I got the rotoscoping effect I wanted, to make things look more puppet-like. Also I like the rotoscoping effect in the Lord of the Rings animation (1978), which was the first feature-lenght animation to use it all the way through the film :

Some parts would be more silhouette-like characters. A bit like in the Sin City feature :

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STARTING OUT

So! There I go merrily bouncing to school just to hear that the green screen studio is not even built yet! All I have is the photography studio at school but the green/blue screen capabilities there were very poor. Luckily, knowing that my characters will be heavily filtered and mostly be silhouette-like, I wanted to try with the white screen they had in the photo studio. As we know, white is really hard to key out (compared to green and blue) since all the higlights in objects become white thus transparent. But I tried lighting everything red, leaving the background white and key it out. Here you can see the studio setting :

And here’s one shot frame :

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SEEKING FOR THE “MOVEMENT-FEEL”

Traditionally a pixilation look was achieved by taking a picture, then moving the person a bit + all the other accessories around, take a picture again and go back to move the stuff and the actor again. Very tedious and slow workflow (By the way, check out any Czech pixilation and I can bet my head off that there’s either a chair, a beer or a sausage – or all together animating around)

The Secret adventures of Tom Thumb was made like this.

Working by pixilation they could make the little puppets alive on the screen at the same time with the human actors. Of course, this made the human actors puppet-like (you can’t get them both work without using a C-o-m-p-u-t-e-r, Jan), and mostly even much worse animated. All the actors looked like suffering from some ill sickness waving around like frantic sticks. This might’ve fit Tom the Thumb, but not my animation.

In my first tests I wanted to limit that waving-wobbling-effect as much as possible. So I used this :

Credits go again to Pekka Veikkolainen for this tip. By shooting with remote switch, I can set my Canon d350 shoot continuously. Shooting continuously I aimed to achieve more natural look – without shaking actor. Because I wasn’t animating any other objects than the actor, this was doable.
Now the thing is that during the camera-shooting the actor has to move reeeeaaaalllly slowly without stopping. Imagine 25 clicks for a second of movement in the film!
By testing this technique with my friends Markus and Toni, we noticed a first issue to handle; If you don’t know how to move, the timing and direction, the pixilation result will look really unnatural, waving and wobbling = bad. The first remedy for this problem was to shoot a digital footage first in realtime, then slow that footage down 10-15 times the original speed and play it as a reference while the actor is moving. Trying to follow the timing and speed of that footage. By doing this we got more pleasing results.
Still, there were very noticable differences between actors. All in all, I ended acting most of the characters myself on the whole animation since it is very hard for people without animating experience to know about curves and speeds and actually be the real animated character.

Now, when the tests were ready I needed some handy hands around to help me with lights and camera. Thanks to all you people involved. Unfortunately the schedule in the school studio was quite tight, so I had to shoot many shots all by myself (Imagine a guy in a weird dress, with a mask starting the camera, running really fast to the scene and start slowly move like they do in tai chi).