And now it’s time for an animation I’ve wanted to talk about since the first episode
of Scribble Kibble: Freak Of The Week.
Click the link below to watch this animated music video before I start talking about it.
I love the hair.
Whoosh!
This animation has one heck of a backstory.
Spanish artist Juanjo Guarnido, whose work you may recognize from Blacksad and Disney,
wanted to animate his own smaller project.
He made some album art for the Swedish rock band Freak Kitchen, started talking about
raising money to do a music video, and pinned French studio Fortiche Production as the ones
capable of making it.
They raised $142,000 on Kickstarter, enough money plus extra to pay a team of about 35
artists.
That may seem like a lot of money to you, but it’s cheap for this quality 2D animation.
Even if you compare with music videos in general, budgets for those are $200,000 on average.
The great thing about Freak Of The Week is it has everything: 2D, 3D, motion capture,
special effects, and live action.
The live action clips are public domain archive footage.
The thing that strikes me the most about this whole animation is how freakishly accurate
the characters stay, regardless of what the camera is doing.
This is one of my favorite shots.
It takes forever to draw each picture to give that 3D effect, but if you know the secret
behind the video, keeping the characters accurate isn’t magic.
They’re drawn on top of 3D models.
The animators draw on top of rough 3D animation to create what you see.
The process of “tracing” (there’s more to it than tracing) is called rotoscoping.
Most of the time if an animator is rotoscoping, they draw on top of real people.
The problem with this is it makes the characters not animated enough.
In animation you often exaggerate motions, otherwise it looks fake.
This is why Juanjo decided to go with 3D animation as a base instead of live actors, because
you can make 3D models move in inhuman ways.
So the team had to animate Freak Of The Week twice: once in 3D and once in 2D.
Rotoscoping the 3D animation isn’t as simple as tracing.
You’ll notice that the animators have to add all of the details and fix poses.
These models are bald, so all of the imagination about the hair and how it should move is up
to the 2D animators.
With this rough style of outline, each of the drawings has to be colored by hand, so
some of the artists are colorists.
Their only job is coloring finished drawings.
When the animation is done you don’t want to lose the rough outline, since that’s
this style’s particular charm, so the artists doing the lighting and compositing have to
be careful not to put so many effects down that the lines are hidden.
The end result is a 2D animation on top of a 3D setting.
Even the fretting and drum playing are accurate.
The characters aren’t strumming random chords.
If this is your first time seeing this animation, were you startled at the end by how much alike
these guys and the cartoon characters look?
I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh!”
Haha.
That’s all for this animation freak, every week, right here on Scribble Kibble.
Sssssss.