Swinging

Shot 74

Hi all. I'm still working in spare time (of which I have little these days) on this music video for Bubble Gum Orchestra's ELO influenced song. Luckily as the single was released before the video was decided upon there is no rush for it. Phew! Anyway, this shot required the character's to be happily swinging each other around. At first I intended animating this in Plastic Animation Paper and started this process. However, I soon decided it'd probably be quicker to model and animate the character's in Hash (the affectionate name for Martin Hash's Animation:Master software). I loaded images of the character's into Hash and used these as 'rotoscopes' to model from. I modelled quite roughly as the intention was to trace over the resulting animation in Anime Studio.

After adding a simple rig to each character I posed and animated them swinging each other around. I made sure this would cycle so I could run it for as long as the shot required.

After experimenting with renders from Hash I decided that rather than spend a whole lot of time tracing and colouring the images in Anime Studio that I would be much better off using a Toon Render from Hash. I always render out as Png images. I could then load these images into Anime studio and add lighting and the bold black outline. As I'd modelled quite roughly I loaded each image into PD Pro first to clean them up a bit. The eyelids didn't quite cover the edge of the eye in my model for example.

Once the animation was in Anime Studio I created a simple panning background with the word Xanadu as this is mentioned in the song at this point. I tried various particle effects in AS but wasn't quite happy with any of the results. This is where a lot of time can go by in animation! It's all the experimentation and testing that eat up hours =0)

Eventually I gave in and exported the background and character's separately and loaded everything into HitFilm. In Hitfilm I added effects to the background and a further lighting effect to the character's before rendering out the final shot.

Thanks for looking and hopefully I won't be so long next time!