Explaining popular animations is nice because you might’ve seen them and wondered how
they were made, but I love digging for treasure.
The Rainbow Serpent trailer for Army of Frogs is an unopened chest of gold.
Behold its shininess here.
The actual animated series came out on Netflix recently.
I’d be surprised if you’ve seen it, but if you have, it’s pretty obvious that the
trailer is a completely different caliber of animation.
(Secret Sauce Studios vs Splash Entertainment) The series is animated in Flash and designed
for mass episode production.
The trailer is a highly detailed short feature.
I love the opening shot in the trailer.
When I first saw it with my untrained eyes years ago, it was spectacular.
In reality it’s not complicated.
The studio paints a background in multiple layers.
This one is at least three: foreground clouds, mountain, sky and clouds.
Then, they paint another layer with the brush stroke shapes.
After that they apply a rainbow effect to the layer and use fading, oval shaped masks,
and some saturation or level controls to make it pulse like this.
The shape of the rainbow layer doesn’t change, although it does grow a bit, so I wonder if
that might be another layer fading in on top of it, or if it’s the result of an effect.
In the Kulipari trailer the effects and environmental animation is really something else.
Take this water - it has the anticipation of a rising wave but the crash of a huge tsunami.
You don’t doubt for a second that the scale of the water is enormous.
It has weight.
The lightning rays look great in real time.
If you slow it down you’d be surprised at how unexpected the sequence of drawings is
to make the effect look right in real time.
Unusual shapes definitely apply to fast character animation too.
The action sequences in the trailer have huge, dynamic poses and perspective shifts.
When something is changing that fast, you can usually find funny smear frames.
The purpose of these is to create the illusion of movement between two extremely different
poses.
The frog’s leg is here, and then it is all the way over here, a 270 degree rotation from
the previous spot.
Here’s the smear frame joining the two.
Pretty obvious why it’s called a smear frame.
There’s nothing surprising about the process to make an animation like this.
Secret Sauce Studios starts with a rough animation.
They do a second pass with a red line to correct proportions and add details.
Take that and ink it, with further corrections.
Add color.
Add shading.
Add everything else.
The last “add everything else” phase is called compositing.
The cinematic quality of the trailer is worth noting.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the animation.
It’s all about planning out the sequence of events.
The impact of the slow crawling pan over the scorpion army would be small if we hadn’t
just watched a bunch of action sequences.
Butting a fast paced shot up against a slow one makes the difference between the two all
the more apparent.
If the trailer were 100% action, we wouldn’t get the drama of the moment at the end, and
if it were 100% slow panning shots, we’d fall asleep.
Okay.
That’s a wrap.
I’m going to go dig for more gems.