When undertaking any project, it’s always interesting to see how things along way differ from your original plans. Whether due to aesthetic shifts, technical challenges, or time constraints, things never seem to turn out as planned. That’s part of the fun though, right?
This week found me beginning work on one of the three sections in this project. The Fox in Greece is the shortest of the three and seemed like a good place to start. I thought it would give me a good idea of how to plan for the other two sections. This one has its basis in an actual Greek myth and gave me some very colorful characters to work with.
Stylistically I wanted these animation to be set against a worn paper backdrop so it seemed the stories were actually jumping off the pages of a book. I used various blending modes in the comps in Photoshop, with the characters inheriting some of the background texture through Color Burn, etc. I assumed that would translate fairly easily to After Effects layers. What I didn’t account for was that when these characters moved over a background, they would inherit that as well. After some trial and error, I got past this using Track Mattes. It’s funny how even though you feel comfortable with certain software, it always takes a bit of refreshing to actually pull it off.
One of the challenges that came up took place during a clip in which a magical dog was chasing a giant fox. More on that here and here I wanted to show these mythical creatures spiraling faster and faster until they became a blur. I thought this could be accomplished with Rotation keyframes and the Speed Graph. As it turns out, I was mistaken. It took quite a bit of failed attempts and Googling before I found this very incredibly helpful post from Dan Ebberts at MotionScript.com. The solution involves some calculus which Dan thankfully does for us, and he even goes the extra mile by providing the expressions. A big thank you to Dan!
I had to use my original scratch audio for this due to an unfortunate case of laryngitis I picked up this week while attending this thriller of a game on Monday night. Nevertheless, going over the audio again and again while editing gave me even more insight on things to change and add when my voice is in better shape to record the final audio.
Creating the assets for this section was great fun if simply for the tons of Greek mythology reference art I looked through. There are so many ways Zeus for example is depicted.
The many moods of Zeus
I ended up creating a sort of amalgam of my own. In the end, I got a lot of practice drawing men in togas.
The men of Thebes
I was able to put together a mostly formed working comp of the first section. There are definitely adjustments to be made, but I’m making progress. In an exciting turn of events, I encountered a real, live fox on my Thursday morning run (excuse the poor quality pic):
Actual fox
I can only take this as a sign of encouragement from the natural world.
More to come next week as we dig in to The Fox in Japan.