Figured I would share my current project with the group. I'm currently working on a 2d animated short titled “Penguins.” The first installment is titled “The Flower.” It comes in with credits and production company vanity plate at exactly 4 minutes 5 seconds. Considering I also animated the credits and animated the vanity, I'm counting that.
-Look a title
I have been kicking around an idea for an animated show about penguins for a while, but never really had time to work on it. My wife loves penguins and I promised her some time back if I ever did an animated penguin project that I would let her voice the penguins. While I was taking time off to help my wife recover from surgery in July, I realized I had some free time. Plus my wife wasn't doing so well and I thought seeing some cute penguins darting around in the water would help cheer her up. So, I started animating some penguins.
Like all projects, it began with a script. Well, while I would like to say the first installment started with a script, I really just made it up as I went along. Which is the completely wrong thing to with animation. If you ever need to have a script and storyboard, it is with animation. That would make my life over the course of the week a little more difficult. But at least I had a remotely vague idea of what I wanted to do. I would have some penguins walk around, jump in the water and swim...yup just the kind of plot gold you think it would be.
So I'm sitting in my underwear in front of the computer, my wife on the couch in a Vicodin induced slumber. By this time I had looked over a few books of penguins and at the various penguin items around the house. I had to make sure my penguins looked like penguins, but not like anyone else's penguins. I decided on basing the little guys loosely on the little blue penguins found along parts of Australia and New Zealand.
Having chosen the type of penguins, I opened up Illustrator and began to make design a penguin. I started with a side view. I decided to avoid the typical 3/4 view employed by most animation. For better or worse this decision would help shape the animation and in some ways allow more freedom than what you see in typical 2d animation. So I built the first prototype penguin. Next I had to break the image apart so I could animate it. Each piece of the penguin that was to move was put on its own layer in the Illustrator file. It is important to leave each element on a separate layer in Illustrator. If not, they cannot be manipulated individually in other programs. Now while the final penguins were to be blue, I made the individual parts either white or charcoal. This would allow me to fully control the color later on.
I had several options of animation software to choose from. While I was leaning to using Toon Boom Animate, I decided to instead use After Effects. Mostly this was so I could do more visually. I decided to treat this like a VFX project and really do more than just move around some layers. Using After Effects I can do far more with color and light. I can also work faster with particle systems. Something I knew I would need to do since there was going to be underwater shots. I used one particle system for bubbles from the penguins plunging into the water and kicking their little pudgy legs. I used another for snow and atmospheric debris. And of course I used particles for the floatism in the water.
-so much tasty floatism
So into After Effects the little penguin went. The Illustrator file was imported as a composition. Then I moved the anchor points and did all the basic rigging and key framing of the penguin. Next I added the color and texture to the penguin. I'm kinda glossing over stuff here as this is not a tutorial and because I kinda don't want to give details about how I take a vector file and turn it into what you see below. I even used AI to create a few custom motion paths for the camera and a few objects.
So I had a little blue penguin that I could make swim, walk, or jump. Time to start building a world for the little guy to play in. Again at this time I was mostly flying blind. I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do and hadn't story boarded anything so I sort of messed around until I had an idea of what I was going to do. So I start with building an underwater scene. I use some shape layers, and stuff to create the ice up top. Then ramp some blue in the background and bada-bing bada-boom I have a comp that is 1920 by 2180. Sadly one of the smallest matte comps I would be working with. After this the size of the comps grew. Some of the more interesting sized comps were 2200x7560, 7680x4000, and 10600x1280. If you are wondering why the large compositions, and even if you aren't I'm going to tell you anyway, it is because when doing a scene or sequence that has a camera moving around or assets moving a distance greater than the screen you have to have everything in place. It is kinda like building a set or stage where you move around the actors and props. Now admittedly some of the comps didn't need to be as big as I made them. There were a number of shots I could have cheated to create the illusion the characters were moving. But I didn't think of it at that time. It wasn't until I was done with the chase sequence that it hit me, “Oh yeah I could of just key framed the colors on the gradient, adjusted the velocity of the particle system, and just keyframed a few layer masks.” One of the downsides of not planning ahead. It cost me more render time than it should have.
So after about 3-4 hours of goofing around I manage to make a simple underwater shot with the title “Penguins” and a little penguin swimming through the letters (see image up top).
3-4 hours for 10 seconds of final video. That kinda blows, but that's how it goes with animation. A good week (40-50hrs) gives about 3-4 minutes of completed animation.
At this point I figured I would start showing what happened before the penguin jumped in the water. But my wife woke up and I had to be a good husband and all that stuff. Showed her the penguins swimming and she was all “Yay Penguins.”
So the next day I worked on stuff happening above the water. At this point I just had the side view of the penguin, so I worked with that and figured I also needed a front view. So I made the front view of the penguin. I also went ahead and did a back view. I now had a front view of the penguin swimming, front view of him waddling, back view of him waddling, side view waddling, and side view swimming.
So from here I complete what will eventually become the title sequence. Basically a penguins walks around, looks up at the bright sun, and jumps in the water where the title is revealed.
Over the rest of the week, I continued to eek out time to work on the short animation until it was nearly complete. I decided it needed a little action, so I drew a killer whale and had it chase the penguin. I eventually went back and expanded the chase a little.
-we're gonna need a bigger penguin
Again had I planned I could of done it all at once and saved myself some time. Eh oh well. Through the course of the week I came up with a few story ideas to flesh out the short. Then my wife had to go back to the hospital for a few days. Needless to say my work on the animation was put on hold.
Though after being up for 2 days spent mostly at the hospital I think my brain went into autopilot. Sleep deprived and full of caffeine and jello, I was doing laundry at midnight in a dinky all night laundromat when I came up with the romance plot thread and resolution for the animation. Yay!
-penguin love, the purest form of love
A few days later my wife was back home and doing better. Yay! I managed to find a little time to finish everything. All in all it took about a week of actual work, broken up with life and its various interruptions and distractions.
Now it was time to do the edit. An hour later I had the edit done. It helped that I saved all the low res tests and had a really good idea where things were going to go at this point.
With the edit done, it was time for sound. I made a decision early on not to have the penguins speak. They only make penguin noises. This serves two purposes: first it allows me to animate without having to match up dialogue and second if I try and market the thing it can play easier to a global audience.
So with my wife better, I loaded up the video and we went through and she watched the video and made penguin noises to match the action. Then later I went and did Foley for all the other sounds. Used everything from my lips to a bowl of water to make the sounds. Most the sounds were done right in my place.
So I mixed in the sounds and spent some time over the next few weeks looking for a composer. I currently have someone scoring and performing the music. They are going to be going old school and projecting the video and playing along with some other musicians. I'm looking forward to seeing it complete.
It has been a bit on the music front, but I don't really have any plans for how I'm going to release this yet or what I'm going to do with it. It was mostly a fun little project.
-mmm fish
As for technical specs, the video is 1920x1080 square pixels at 29.97fps, 32bit color space. Since this is a fun project, I'm using the Avid DNxHD codec instead of rendering to an image sequence. Audio is 48kHz uncompressed. Right now I'm just mixing in stereo (each mono track outputs to a corresponding track), but depending on the music may do something else.
-Look a title
I have been kicking around an idea for an animated show about penguins for a while, but never really had time to work on it. My wife loves penguins and I promised her some time back if I ever did an animated penguin project that I would let her voice the penguins. While I was taking time off to help my wife recover from surgery in July, I realized I had some free time. Plus my wife wasn't doing so well and I thought seeing some cute penguins darting around in the water would help cheer her up. So, I started animating some penguins.
Like all projects, it began with a script. Well, while I would like to say the first installment started with a script, I really just made it up as I went along. Which is the completely wrong thing to with animation. If you ever need to have a script and storyboard, it is with animation. That would make my life over the course of the week a little more difficult. But at least I had a remotely vague idea of what I wanted to do. I would have some penguins walk around, jump in the water and swim...yup just the kind of plot gold you think it would be.
So I'm sitting in my underwear in front of the computer, my wife on the couch in a Vicodin induced slumber. By this time I had looked over a few books of penguins and at the various penguin items around the house. I had to make sure my penguins looked like penguins, but not like anyone else's penguins. I decided on basing the little guys loosely on the little blue penguins found along parts of Australia and New Zealand.
Having chosen the type of penguins, I opened up Illustrator and began to make design a penguin. I started with a side view. I decided to avoid the typical 3/4 view employed by most animation. For better or worse this decision would help shape the animation and in some ways allow more freedom than what you see in typical 2d animation. So I built the first prototype penguin. Next I had to break the image apart so I could animate it. Each piece of the penguin that was to move was put on its own layer in the Illustrator file. It is important to leave each element on a separate layer in Illustrator. If not, they cannot be manipulated individually in other programs. Now while the final penguins were to be blue, I made the individual parts either white or charcoal. This would allow me to fully control the color later on.
I had several options of animation software to choose from. While I was leaning to using Toon Boom Animate, I decided to instead use After Effects. Mostly this was so I could do more visually. I decided to treat this like a VFX project and really do more than just move around some layers. Using After Effects I can do far more with color and light. I can also work faster with particle systems. Something I knew I would need to do since there was going to be underwater shots. I used one particle system for bubbles from the penguins plunging into the water and kicking their little pudgy legs. I used another for snow and atmospheric debris. And of course I used particles for the floatism in the water.
-so much tasty floatism
So into After Effects the little penguin went. The Illustrator file was imported as a composition. Then I moved the anchor points and did all the basic rigging and key framing of the penguin. Next I added the color and texture to the penguin. I'm kinda glossing over stuff here as this is not a tutorial and because I kinda don't want to give details about how I take a vector file and turn it into what you see below. I even used AI to create a few custom motion paths for the camera and a few objects.
So I had a little blue penguin that I could make swim, walk, or jump. Time to start building a world for the little guy to play in. Again at this time I was mostly flying blind. I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do and hadn't story boarded anything so I sort of messed around until I had an idea of what I was going to do. So I start with building an underwater scene. I use some shape layers, and stuff to create the ice up top. Then ramp some blue in the background and bada-bing bada-boom I have a comp that is 1920 by 2180. Sadly one of the smallest matte comps I would be working with. After this the size of the comps grew. Some of the more interesting sized comps were 2200x7560, 7680x4000, and 10600x1280. If you are wondering why the large compositions, and even if you aren't I'm going to tell you anyway, it is because when doing a scene or sequence that has a camera moving around or assets moving a distance greater than the screen you have to have everything in place. It is kinda like building a set or stage where you move around the actors and props. Now admittedly some of the comps didn't need to be as big as I made them. There were a number of shots I could have cheated to create the illusion the characters were moving. But I didn't think of it at that time. It wasn't until I was done with the chase sequence that it hit me, “Oh yeah I could of just key framed the colors on the gradient, adjusted the velocity of the particle system, and just keyframed a few layer masks.” One of the downsides of not planning ahead. It cost me more render time than it should have.
So after about 3-4 hours of goofing around I manage to make a simple underwater shot with the title “Penguins” and a little penguin swimming through the letters (see image up top).
3-4 hours for 10 seconds of final video. That kinda blows, but that's how it goes with animation. A good week (40-50hrs) gives about 3-4 minutes of completed animation.
At this point I figured I would start showing what happened before the penguin jumped in the water. But my wife woke up and I had to be a good husband and all that stuff. Showed her the penguins swimming and she was all “Yay Penguins.”
So the next day I worked on stuff happening above the water. At this point I just had the side view of the penguin, so I worked with that and figured I also needed a front view. So I made the front view of the penguin. I also went ahead and did a back view. I now had a front view of the penguin swimming, front view of him waddling, back view of him waddling, side view waddling, and side view swimming.
So from here I complete what will eventually become the title sequence. Basically a penguins walks around, looks up at the bright sun, and jumps in the water where the title is revealed.
Over the rest of the week, I continued to eek out time to work on the short animation until it was nearly complete. I decided it needed a little action, so I drew a killer whale and had it chase the penguin. I eventually went back and expanded the chase a little.
-we're gonna need a bigger penguin
Again had I planned I could of done it all at once and saved myself some time. Eh oh well. Through the course of the week I came up with a few story ideas to flesh out the short. Then my wife had to go back to the hospital for a few days. Needless to say my work on the animation was put on hold.
Though after being up for 2 days spent mostly at the hospital I think my brain went into autopilot. Sleep deprived and full of caffeine and jello, I was doing laundry at midnight in a dinky all night laundromat when I came up with the romance plot thread and resolution for the animation. Yay!
-penguin love, the purest form of love
A few days later my wife was back home and doing better. Yay! I managed to find a little time to finish everything. All in all it took about a week of actual work, broken up with life and its various interruptions and distractions.
Now it was time to do the edit. An hour later I had the edit done. It helped that I saved all the low res tests and had a really good idea where things were going to go at this point.
With the edit done, it was time for sound. I made a decision early on not to have the penguins speak. They only make penguin noises. This serves two purposes: first it allows me to animate without having to match up dialogue and second if I try and market the thing it can play easier to a global audience.
So with my wife better, I loaded up the video and we went through and she watched the video and made penguin noises to match the action. Then later I went and did Foley for all the other sounds. Used everything from my lips to a bowl of water to make the sounds. Most the sounds were done right in my place.
So I mixed in the sounds and spent some time over the next few weeks looking for a composer. I currently have someone scoring and performing the music. They are going to be going old school and projecting the video and playing along with some other musicians. I'm looking forward to seeing it complete.
It has been a bit on the music front, but I don't really have any plans for how I'm going to release this yet or what I'm going to do with it. It was mostly a fun little project.
-mmm fish
As for technical specs, the video is 1920x1080 square pixels at 29.97fps, 32bit color space. Since this is a fun project, I'm using the Avid DNxHD codec instead of rendering to an image sequence. Audio is 48kHz uncompressed. Right now I'm just mixing in stereo (each mono track outputs to a corresponding track), but depending on the music may do something else.
