Dog Show

In honor of this weeks big dog show, here's a cel level that was cut from a recent commercial we've finished.

This is part of a very complicated crowd scene animated by Doug Compton.

We did a layout test for the client and started animating.

A few weeks later we sent the first half of the pencil test cut into the layout test.  At this time they thought it over and decided against having the dog in the scene.  (we like the dog in the scene, of course, but there are many things not worth arguing for and this kind of thing is a big one)

In any event Doug had already done this level by that point.  Fortunately, he's a discrete part so there was no trouble pulling it.

This isn't inbetweened.  They're just 16 extreme drawings out of 35 total for the character.

The extremes are held for the subsequent undrawn inbetweens.

It's "limited animation" in a sense.  That's how you can make a crowd interesting.

The shot is almost 19 seconds and the 35 drawings play out of the course of that time.

Within the next week or so, we'll post the key drawings and how the AfterEffects project was set up.  It's a good system for testing without inbetweens that is precise and saves work in the long run.