What Are The Odds - part 3, a little animation

This series of posts about our title sequence for "What Are The Odds" has turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected.

Makes sense since it was a complicated little peice.

After boarding and cutting a leica reel, the next step in a narrative film like this is to create a shot list.

43 shots.  3456 frames at 24 fps.

I had thought to post Ed Smith's original artwork as ink drawings.  I forgot that we used the originals in art production.

Inspired by the production process on Eggs we used the original animation drawings and colored directly onto them.  It was a little more complicated, as we wanted a colored line -so we scanned the ink drawings, colored them by hand, scanned them again, then combined the layers in Photoshop.

Somehow I figured this would be the easiest process.

Here's a businessman walking, making a deal on a cel phone, drinking coffee.

He's in lockstep with two other guys.

For the art production we wanted to look like a watercolor.  To mimic this we colored the paper with pencil and smudged it.  This got rid of the pencil line and gave a smooth variation similar to watercolor.  It's also about 50 times faster and more controlled than paint.

Signe Baumane helped out a lot with the art production.

One of the things that Ed Smith is best at is economy.  He can do a lot with a few drawings and not make it look like "limited animation".  I'm working on putting an example from this sequence together.

The downside of this skill is that you need a cameraman and co-ordinator that know what they're doing and when you go back into it a couple years later you need to spend some time trying to remember what you were thinking.

Here's the sheet for this shot.  This is a case where the animator didn't figure out the camera.  The walking men were created as an element to plugged into a sequence.  Ten years this would have been unheard of, today it's commonplace.