I find this one really interesting.
It’s called The Saga of Rex.
Link below, pause for you.
Yeah, the thumbnail looks like it’s a regular animal cartoon, but then aliens.
Aliens.
The Saga of Rex has its own saga.
The animator, Michel Gagne, has decades of experience and worked on real nostalgia kicker
movies like Land Before Time and The Iron Giant.
More recently, the game Battleborn and the My Little Pony Movie.
His record is full of visual effects Director roles - which means animating effects like
this and these.
Rex is Gagne’s thing, that’s his own cute little fox.
It must be really great to have this after all that time making magic for others.
Saga of Rex began a long time ago as a 32 page black and white graphic novel, reborn
into a new story a few years later.
Then it took shape as a massive, full color graphic novel funded via Kickstarter.
Gagne animated it, presumably to turn it into a pitch for a full movie.
And the great thing is it’s becoming a movie, a full hour and half with no dialogue.
Yep.
No dialogue.
I think it’s going to be wonderful.
I don’t know how much of the visual style of the animation will hold true to the movie,
but I’d like to think it will be similar or higher.
Gagne animated Saga of Rex mainly in Toon Boom, with some backgrounds and painted elements
made in Photoshop, After Effects for special effects, and Premiere for editing.
Gagne actually draws a lot of his effects by hand, so I’m thinking After Effects is
for things like the lightning over the spheres and these smoke tails, but NOT for the sparkly
shimmers.
Those are handmade.
I think I know which effect the lightning is.
Let me try it.
Yes, no, maybe?
The Saga of Rex animation makes a lot of use of Toon Boom’s puppet tools and/or After
Effects puppet pin tool.
Essentially what you do is put a pin on a part of the body you want to use as a joint,
and then drag the body part around.
You’ll notice it a lot if you watch this again and look for it.
Any time there is no new drawing, and animals are swaying or wiggling, that’s puppet pin.
Watch the little legs on this bug.
And the distortions of this spine-backed - um - thing.
The art isn’t new, it’s just being deformed.
It’s a great time-saving trick.
You can even animate tails this way.
It doesn’t look as natural as this hand drawn tail, but it gets the job done.
The most obvious use of the distortion is the last part with Rex in it.
His body is squishing and shrinking and the tail is floaty.
Contrast it with the drawn frames right after that.
A great feature that Toon Boom has is for coloring characters like Rex.
Notice the dark brown outer line on him.
This line doesn’t exist for his face pattern.
Normally what you would do is draw the face pattern shape with the color of the fill,
like this.
But!
In Toon Boom, you can draw invisible lines.
That gives you all of the control of line editing with these control points, but no
visible line.
It’s great for animating sections of color that have no visible line between them.
Watch the pencil test for the animation, and you’ll notice there are these crazy clouds
of lines moving around all the time.
That’s for shading.
It’s sloppy outside the character because the only thing that matters is it makes a
complete shape so you can fill it with a bucket tool quickly.
Nothing outside the character shows in the final product.
Shading is toned down and softened as part of the style.
Alright.
It’s been a long time coming for the movie, and it looks like we’ll still have to wait
a few years, so yep.
I guess we’ll keep waiting for it!