We have completed Day 17 of the filming of ‘Monty’s Quest’. Over the next two weeks we hope to have three more filming days to complete the main live-action material. Further shoots will include live-action to be used for rotascoping the ‘Jealous Husband’ sequence and a range of other scenes that will combine both live-action and animation.
In preparation for this next phase of the production, I have been looking at various software packages. Due to this production being on a micro-budget, I have opted for Open Source applications. To produce the sample rotascope animation above, I used Pencil.
In addition to using Pencil, instead of using a mouse, I used an AipTek Slim Tablet 600U Premium II and stylus. This allowed me to sketch out the artwork in a similar fashion to using a traditional pencil on paper.
To begin the animation test I shot a short piece of video using a Canon IXUS 100. The 1280 x 720 pixel video records at 30 frames per second. Apple’s QuickTime 7 Pro was used to expert an image sequence and only those frames I intended to sketch out were imported into Pencil. Using the sequence numbers, it was easy enough to place to images in the timeline at the correct frame. Once all the images where added, I selected a vector layer to draw out the character. The line tool was used by clicking on the image at various points, like designing a dot-to-dot drawing. The Bezier curves could then be manipulated by using the finger tool in the tool palette.
Once all the outline drawings were complete, I added a second vector layer to for the skin tone and then used a second bitmap layer to paint the eyes, hair and mouth details. The finished sequences was exported out as a series of JPEGs (though PNG files can also be exported with alpha channels) and the sequence was imported into Apple’s Final Cut Pro (not Open Source) to match up with the audio from the video clip.
In all, the project took about 16 hours to complete. This would mean quite a mammoth task of completing MQ, so I am intending to get a host of volunteers to help produce the animation. Effectively, each volunteer would be given about 8 seconds worth of material (200 frames) with the images sequence added to the Pencil file. All that would be required is for volunteer artist to sketch out the keyframe images and paint in the character’s colours. Over the next few weeks I will record a training video to take each volunteer through the procedure. The process should take each volunteer about 16 hours to complete their section of the final animation. Though we have no-budget, each volunteer will be given a credit at the end of the film.
In the meantime, keep up-to-date by revisiting the website and we will let you know how things are progressing and dates for when you can get involved in this rotascoping experiment.
Thanks for visiting this site.
All the best
George
