Telling Tales: Week 9 - Part 2. Paint on Glass Animation Production Process

Planning

Before doing the actual painting, there are some pre-production planning to ensure that the production process will run smoothly. 

This is one of the planning excerpts that I sticked in my sketchbook. There are some others that I did on paper in the studio, but have not managed to organised them yet. Planning is necessary to get the right timing for the special effects, although it could be changed while doing the line test. A simple approach I have used to plan out the timing is to draw a horizontal line and make a timeline breakdown on the line. First of all, I wrote down the frame number in which the scene starts and ends. Then, I add more frame numbers in between in which form or directional changes occur.

This method is just a simplified version the animation Dope sheet, which is used by professional practitioners and big animation studios to plan out their animation.

Dope Sheet

Line tests

Some of the line tests I did on Photoshop for the spirit animation, which are printed grayscale afterwards. we used them as the outline for the painting.

Normally, the spirits move in a circular manner while floating upwards.

Spirit 1.1

When Totsi sneezes, she broke the Shaman's concetration, and the spirits dissipate to the surroundings.

 

Spirit 1.2 (Can't loop this)

Totsi's first try in summoning the spirits.

Spirit 2

Paint on Glass

How we set the set up:

• Taping the top of the glass to make a hinge so we can change over the paper we put underneath easily.
• Sticking masking tapes at the back of the acrylic glass to mark a corner where the paper should be placed.

Setup

On the first day, we scraped off the paint with this plastic knife, but the next day, we couldn't find the knife, so we rubbed the paint off with tissue. The plastic knife is pretty handy because it can scrape off all the paints without leaving any marks from the glass, while wiping the paint off with tissue leaves some oil marks. Fortunately, the oil marks does not pose a major problem because it does not affect the images captured by the camera.

Scraping off the paint with plastic knife

Turning on the light box accentuate the mark making, hence makes the animation more interesting.

Climax: Smoke and Spirit

Switching off the light box out of curiosity. The textures can be barely seen.

Lightbox switched off

One thing that went wrong in the painting process is that we did not agree on which light to be switched on. As a result, the lighting of the scenes painted by Dan is different to those that I have painted. I just noticed it when I saw the colour difference between our spirit painting. I have brought it up to him, and we settled with not repainting these scenes as we don't have the luxury of time to do so.

Swooshing Fire

Clean Up

The most painstaking process of mixing paint on glass animation with CGI animation is cleaning up. I used Photoshop to clean up the images one-by-one with the Magic Wand and Lasso tool, and once each is done, save the image as PNG.

One thing that I might have to try next week is to feather the edges of the fire and spirits to make a glow effect which helps them blend into the scene.

Normal Fire

Spirit 2.1

Spirit 2.2

References

EFX showreel pencil test from the production of Disney's Hercules

Effective line test: Simple outline and straightforward, not focusing so much on details but the essential information are well-communicated. This is possibly how our line test will look like. The details are added during the paint-on-glass process.

Elemental Magic by Joseph Gilland

A really useful cheat sheet, perhaps the bible of special effects animation, just like the survival kit.

   

Gilland describes fire as 'luminous gases being released and rising quickly from their former state into the air', but without any external forces being added to a fire, it will be burning as a perfect featureless sphere.

Since we are animating the fire on a fireplace, it is important to consider the violent and reactionary movement of the fire to outside forces, and hence the fire that we draw should have lots of opposing curves, billows and flickers. We could also add more details, such as crackles from the burning woods, for a more believable illusion of life.

Gilland's breakdowns of the direction of fire's movement

Olivier Malric's special effect demo reel which are some pencil test for 2D animated elemental special effects

A more complex pencil test done by professional practitioner who specialises on special effect for 2D animation. The amount details fits in perfectly with the 2D aesthetic. It takes years of work to get to this level, so it is definitely not feasible for us to do our elemental special effects in this fashion. Although Malric's demo reel helps me understand the way smoke particles are drawn so that they seem to move in 3 dimensional space despite being drawn in 2 dimensional medium.