You want to hear about a Five Nights At Freddie’s fan animation?
Fffffine.
Actually I’m going to use this as an excuse to talk about Harvey Rothman’s animations.
So while technically the feature is Foxy Gets Hooked, I’d like to also direct your attention
to this collection of short clips.
Aaand Go!
I completely sympathize with people who don’t like the same animation subjects that I like,
because Foxy Gets Hooked is just painful for me to watch.
Not really like being stabbed, but more like being beat repeatedly with a rubber mallet.
So now I know how you feel about fan animations related to the show you hate.
Hence why I included these other animations by Harvey Rothman, because they are a great
summary of the quality, style, and techniques in his repertoire.
Woo, let’s start with animation techniques because that’s the good part.
First off: camera lenses.
Notice how the camera moves in this shot.
It has a fish-eye feel to it, which in cinematography you can achieve by changing which lens is
on your video camera.
In animation, you can apply distortion effects to your 2D animation layers, or you can build
a 3D model and fiddle with the camera that displays your 3D model.
The best place to see this in action is here.
This is a single background painting.
It revolves like a carousel, like it’s stretched over a big cheese wheel that is rotating.
While I suspect a select few of the Foxy Gets Hooked backgrounds are 2D paintings placed
on 3D objects, it’s quite possible Rothman achieved this rotating effect with some kind
of After Effects-esque manipulating.
There’s always multiple ways to do the same thing.
You can see him practice recreating the look and feel of an anamorphic camera lens in this
few second long animation.
As for the other two shorts, they showcase Rothman’s ability to bring back the feel
of a classic cartoon.
Did you watch black and white cartoons on VHS as a kid?
I did.
He captures it so perfectly.
What I appreciate about the shorts is their unique style and consistency.
Yep.
My schtick about Foxy Gets Hooked isn’t really that it’s about Five Nights At Freddie’s:
it’s consistency.
Halfway through the style breaks to thicker outlines, single-tone coloring, and no camera
movement.
It seems to me like Rothman just needed to finish these shots.
The look and feel is completely different from the beginning of the animation.
And there are shots interspersed that look like they might’ve been done before he got
sick of working on the thing, so they are more polished.
It just feels like the toon disintegrates as I watch it.
The story dissolves into pointless slapstick humor at the same time the art loses its focus
and the soundscape disappears.
There’s well-placed music here and there in the beginning, but during the comedy section
it’s pure sound effects.
I had to make sure I wasn’t crazy and go check cartoons like Tom and Jerry and Pink
Panther to see if they had music during action sequences.
Of course they did!
The funny part about all this is I’m completely missing the point.
The reason this happens to the animation is because Harvey Rothman spent so long making
it that he reached a stage where he decided to just have fun with it.
He tossed out the storyboards and made everything up as he went.
The voice actors improvised a lot of their lines without scripts.
So the result is a cartoon that starts out with a story and then just ends silly.
Haha.
Anyway, I really love the animation styles on his channel, so here’s hoping for more!