On this special episode of Scribble Kibble: Adventure! Fire! Romance! Snakes! Because
this is a show about animation made by an animator. And animators… can do anything.
Mmmmblaaahhhhh.
Tigtone is the featured animation, and I’m excited to share the odd animation technique
behind it.
I love this animation so much. It’s a massive, brilliant joke about fantasy movies and games.
But if that’s not your schtick, surely you can still appreciate the captivating, grotesque
animation of these amazing illustrations.
Have you ever seen some of the behind the scenes of a live action movie where you’ve
got someone in a spandex suit with all these little balls or dots attached to it walking
around?
That is essentially how Tigtone is animated. It’s called motion capture. Or performance
capture. That works too.
Mike here has a bunch of dots glued directly to his face. He orients himself to line up
with the general position of the finished artwork. Then the studio films him. They don’t
need special cameras to do this; it’s the software that does the work.
Just like with animation software, there is a plethora of motion capture software to choose
from. Maybe you’ve played with a webcam face identification program that turns the
image of yourself into a talking dog or cartoon person. That type of motion capture tries
to read the position of your nose, eyes, and lips to mimic your movements. Right now that
type of motion capture is not very precise.
Or maybe you’ve seen Dog of Wisdom. That’s animated with a motion capture device called
Leap Motion which reads the position of your hand.
Tigtone is a step up from those. Motion capture software tracks the position of each of these
balls to determine the morphology (the shape) of the face and its muscles as the actor talks.
The data on those positions is then translated onto the artwork.
Motion capture technology is getting better, but it isn’t perfect. Motions that look
normal for the actor may translate weird onto the fantasy character, so animators have to
go through and make a lot of adjustments to the character animation after the fact. Tigtone
probably did a lot less of the cleanup phase, leaving the animation in its bizarre, “uncanny
valley” state most of the time. Leaving it weird is the point.
Parts of Tigtone that don’t require motion capture can be done with relative ease using
a puppet pin warp tool and a ton of tweens. The pen and hand here are flat pieces of art
that only change in position and rotation, no warp.
You can poke around on the internet and find highly detailed illustrations animated in
this way. Sometimes people get permission to use a really fancy piece of art and puppet
warp it to make it look like the hair is moving. The example I’m showing is drawn by the
artist ____ and animated with permission by ____.
For more complicated items you can actually record live action of household objects and
motion track parts of those. Like this cape could be a real world piece of fabric with
dots attached to it, filmed just like they did to animate Tigtone talking. A motion tracker
in an editing program would track the dots on the fabric, and that data would be applied
to the cape art.
I’ve done this before to record the position of characters, but I did have to go in and
frame by frame fix a lot of parts where the motion tracker in After Effects didn’t calculate
right and was jumping all over the place. In the end it would’ve been easier to animate
the motion paths by hand.
By the way, Cartoon Network recently trademarked Tigtone. So… Adult Swim maybe?
Yea, step closer traveller, and I shall tell you the tale of the artwork I have seen. Wolves
with twinkling eyes gazing to the skies. Traveling long distances in search of a greater purpose.
Those who are puffed up with pride, those who are fluffed up in fancy, and those who
must eat packages of dry scribble spaghetti to survive.
Skye Wascoe CharlieDoodle
KidCryPie McKenzie Burns
LAWFUl XxCobaltChaosxX