We caught up with MAKE’s Director and Lead Animator for “Palm Springs,” Andrew Chesworth, where he was kind enough to share some exclusive behind-the-scenes artwork and info on how the studio’s artists created the piece.
Aiming the sights toward something controlled and sophisticated without running the clock out on tedious perfection is what allowed the project to really have momentum and energy in the creative process, and it only supported the style. We also try to keep the technical workflow flexible and up to date. This is completely paperless 2D animation. It’s all drawn via Cintiq into Photoshop using the timeline feature, with custom pencil and dry brush settings for the linework, painted animated textures and shadows. Just like traditional animation on paper, rough body gesture passes were followed by cleaner keys and breakdowns, and eventually tight in-betweening and erasure touch-up. Production artists straight-ahead painted the colors, shadows and textures along the Photoshop timeline once the character animation for a scene was completed. Everything was compositied in After Effects ultimately.
In 2d animation, everything starts from scratch and things become a lot more labor intensive, in contrast to 3d. I assume the crew must have been pouring a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this piece. How long was MAKE working on it?
I concepted the idea last year over the course of a day and a half for the 2009 ShortFest, and it was shelved. A year later, it was resurrected for the 2010 ShortFest . I jumped right into re-designing the characters in mid-March, and within a few days had a script, storyboards, and an animatic with a scratch track. While searching for actors and getting final vocal tracks, layout began and backgrounds were done by early April. Animation production went from April to June with a few breaks in-between for other projects. There was a lot of offset crew availability, but everyone was very committed and very passionate to maintaining quality.
Blood, sweat and tears indeed when into it, but projects this exciting are rare and motivation came easily. It’s hard to say if doing the project in 3D with the same number of characters and environments would’ve taken longer. The production timeline may have been comparable with our small crew, especially considering all the movement and contact of hair and clothing throughout the piece. Sacrifices in production sophistication would’ve possibly happened in 3D, or else some kind of non-traditional rendering style would’ve been attempted instead. This project we only saw in 2D. It just felt right.
There seems to be a seamless mix of 2d and 3d in this piece. Can you elaborate on the methods in how you integrated 3d animation into this piece?
To get them to mesh as well as possible beyond just rendering with specifically arranged linework, the frame rates were manipulated (something on ‘twos’ in 2D should rarely be seen against something on ‘ones’ in 3D), flatter 3D lenses were used to get more of a drawn-looking perspective on the cel-shaded objects, and texture overlays with 2D rotoscoped effects were implemented to sell the integration. A clear example of this would be the illumination of the enemy car as the machine gun fires. The dimensionality of a 3D object shouldn’t overtly outshine or sabotage that of a 2D character in the same space. We tried to capture what worked so well about the dimensional vehicles from 101 Dalmatians. Organic things in this style seem to look better when drawn, and technical things (vehicles, ceiling fans, film projectors) that have much more mechanical and specific movements seem very pleasing when done well in 3D.
Credits:
Director/Lead Animator:
Andrew Chesworth
Animation Production Team:
Justin Weber
Aaron Quist
Alec Mueller
Jordan Hill
Ben Bury
Niklas Norman
Joe Kim
Voices:
John Olive
Elise Langer
Nicholas Mrozinski
Music:
Steve Horner – Horner Music
Producer:
Danny Robashkin
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