Moho Forum

Hi,

Alisa and I finished our latest animated short. It's called 'Scareplane' and it's based on my webcomic 'Brudders'. This film is also our first 2D animated movie and, needless to say, it's our first created using Anime Studio Pro. Our previous short films have been live action with puppets or full CGI, so making this film was a different experience for us. I'm sure we'll be making more movies using ASP because this was a lot of fun to do.

So, without further ado, we present 'Scareplane'. Enjoy your fright.



Here's a link if you would like to watch the movie on our website: Brudders in 'Scareplane'

G.

What a wonderful animation! It's not just well done and has particularly nice backgrounds, not to mention the almost 3D-ish airplane at the beginning, but's got a really cute ending. Extremely well done!

Thank you for the compliment!

Alisa painted the interior backgrounds so she'll be happy to hear this. Regarding the 727 exterior shots, these are actually 3D--the four airplane shots were animated in LightWave 3D. Everything else however (including the tiny image of Sergeant inside the airplane in the second exterior shot) was drawn and animated in ASP.

G.

Love this. Beautiful work. Excellent style backed with straightforward effective animation. Also, hard to not love something with such simple but visually engaging storytelling (and spot on pacing.) Great payoff at the end. Has a very satisfying whimsical/morbid imaginative feel that reminds me a little of old "calvin & hobbes" adventures. Would like to see more of your work, thanks for sharing.

Thank you!

I'd also like to thank the artists and coders of this forum who offered technical advice and contributed incredibly useful scripts to the Anime Studio community. The learning curve for ASP was higher than I anticipated but you guys helped make the experience a fun and educational.

Of course, I also wish to thank the developers of Anime Studio Pro for creating such a wonderful (and affordable) production tool. Looking forward to using version 10!

G.

Awesome job!

I am a real fan of the Brudders comic. I won't go so far as to say it's as good as Calvin and Hobbes but it has that wonderful child like imagination inspiration that I missed when C&H ended. I think it also has it's own unique spin.

For the animation, I was thinking you didn't have to go so far with 3D realism. It doesn't take away from the story, but... I just don't think all that extra effort adds more to it. I am thinking "ROI" return on investment. I'm just not a huge fan of mixing 2d and 3d. They did this with with Futurama and I felt it stood out "in a bad way".

I think you could stick with the "hand drawn" 2D look and it would be just as good... and stay true to the original comic... and maybe save you some rendering time!

Just a personal observation and personal opinion.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[Spoiler alert!]

Regarding the use of 3D for the 727 flight shots, I see your point and I generally agree with you regarding the aesthetics of cgi vs 2D, but the decision to use 3D for the four airplane shots was mostly a practical one. Texturing, lighting and animating the airplane was the easiest part of this production and it's actually where I spent the least amount of time. (I probably spent a lot more time designing the logo on the tail fin for this squence.) Of course it helps that working in 3D is what Alisa and I normally do for a living, so animating the flight scenes this way a piece of cake for us. To be honest, I was far more interested in drawing and animating the characters than in drawing and animating a 727 for this production, so going with 3D for these shots was simply a better use of my time.

I also felt there was a dramatic justification for using 3D in these shots--by animating and rendering the falling aircraft 'realistically', I believed the crisis could be pushed to a more intense level than if we had gone 'toon' style with it.

Finally, because the airline situation was the characters' playtime fantasy, I felt it was okay to make this world look different from their 'real' world. (There's precedence for this story device in the comic strip.)

Just a little insight on what I was thinking when I made these decisions. Hope this response doesn't sound too pretentious.

All that said, I wasn't completely happy with the cel shading of the airplane and I wish I had been able to spend more time getting it right. But learning Anime Studio Pro (which was my real goal on this production,) took longer than I anticipated, and having gone way over schedule, I had to let this one go. (I really thought I was going to be done with this film last Thanksgiving. Oh, well.)

Overall, I'm quite happy with how 'Scareplane' turned out. I could have spent more time noodling a few things but a good friend told me, "'Done' leads to 'more'," and I'm eager to make 'more' now.

G.

heyvern wrote:I think you could stick with the "hand drawn" 2D look and it would be just as good... and stay true to the original comic... and maybe save you some rendering time!

You know, as someone who is currently working on something that relies heavily on merging 2D and 3D, I still have to agree with heyvern. If this is your first Anime Studio work --and you clearly have a strong sense of design and drawing skill-- bringing the components of the comic strip into animation is pretty straightforward.

I think these character dynamics are very fun and very clever. An innocent classic setup with a the adult twist payoff. I spent some time looking at your other work and I'm becoming a fan as well. But ultimately, there's actually something more compelling to me about keeping the style grounded in the 2D realm.

(Bear in mind, I'm now basing most of this critique off of comparing the "Brudders" comic strip to "Happy Box" and then comparing those to "Scareplane.")

I think your animation comes off as simpler, but more crisp and defined in the 2D world, which lends well to this type of storytelling and the style of characters you have. I think punchlines and pacing are working well on all sides, but has a little more "pop" so to speak when the 2D artwork/2D animation guides the viewer. The 3D work is great, but as much as anything, there's a lot to look at, and in a way, sort of undermines the imaginative/fantastic sequences when you get there.

As far as stating my personal tastes, I think I appreciate the animation (2D or otherwise) with voice acting over the comic strip itself simply because I find "dialect-dialogue" tiresome after a while. (I guess it just plays much cuter when I hear it than when I read it.) But overall it's still working well.

All of this to essentially say, what it does come down to, as heyvern mentioned, is the "ROI." My personal gravitation toward making 3D environments are based on my individual project (which involves reusing a lot of the same background material, potentially needing to re-purpose it) So as solo artist on this, I decided my time and skill sets were better suited to the 3D approach than the 2D redraws involved.

It's still going to be a preference and personal choice. Just consider: if it doesn't save you time, or doesn't truly enhance the work... is it worth it?

***EDIT***

Greenlaw wrote:I also felt there was a dramatic justification for using 3D in these shots--by animating and rendering the falling aircraft 'realistically', I believed the crisis could be pushed to a more intense level than if we had gone 'toon' style with it.

Definitely on the right track here in my opinion. It doesn't necessarily need to be pushed to the edge with 3D though. Your pull-back to reality reveals are so on the mark that you really could get away with reining it in. Style choices for the plane cabin, outifits, etc. put us in that world... and then the quick change back to "cats and a kid in a box" does most of that work for you. ***

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. And maybe we're trying to offer up more than you're looking for

I'll leave it with the positive: Based on 1 post here, you got at least 1 fan. Very interested to see where you go from here. Keep us in the loop.

Greenlaw wrote: ...but a good friend told me, "'Done' leads to 'more'"

Also, couldn't help but mention (given the varied thoughts on how much time I've been spending on my project) that sounds like a great friend, a wise friend, and very true and supportive advice.

I don't often get to hear what others think about my work so this is all very interesting to me. Thanks for feedback guys. It's fuel for thought.

Down the road, we do intend to produce 'Brudders' as a regular web series, and when that happens, I agree the designs will need to be simplified to look more like the comic series. That's not just a stylistic choice but a practical one to make the series doable in a tiny studio like ours. Even if we accept third party funding for the series and hire a small crew, it's going to take a ton of work to produce a regular web series, so keeping it simple is just smart planning. (Although, I often find that making something look simple can be very hard work too.)

That's a ways off though. For now Alisa and I are mainly interested in creating pretty 'show pieces' to build interest in our studio and, as a matter of course, we'll keep fussing about the design and technical aspects of our productions. (Okay, okay, the fussing is really more me than Alisa. She's firmly in the 'done is good' camp, which is why she has the unenviable position of producer on our productions. Left to my own devices, I might drag these things out forever. Thank goodness for producers.)

Anyway, now that 'Scareplane' has been completed, we're going back to finish 'Pooper' (our Brudders music video,) which is a project that really has gone on too long. After that, I want to make a 3D short film called RVJ, which will be our first film without cats.

And when this is completed, maybe then we'll be ready to start that web series.

G.

I loved it. Very charming and has a nice 'warm' feel to it
I can see what people mean about the 3D. It looks almost like a blurred photo but it didn't detract at all. Great work.

I think there might be some confusion about what was rendered as cgi and what wasn't. Technically, only the four airplane exterior shots (two in the beginning and two near the end,) were set up, animated and rendered in LightWave 3D. My intention was to cel shade the airplane but I didn't have time to set this up properly. Instead, I used a stepped gradient in the diffuse channel and basic edge outlines to get a 'semi-cel-shaded' look. Then I enhanced the outline in comp by beefing up the alpha channel. The background is a just a quick Photoshop painting of sky and clouds, which I knocked out and re-used for nearly all the scenes in the show, both 2D and 3D scenes. That's pretty much it. Rendering these four scenes took only a few minutes each on a singe computer--we didn't even need to fire up the render farm for this.

Everything else was set up and animated in Anime Studio Pro 9.5.

The backgrounds were painted by Alisa in Photoshop using found photographs from an actual 727 and composite images from a flight simulator as visual reference. I specifically wanted to feature a 727 interior within reasonable accuracy but the problem was that photographic reference did not exist for the camera angles depicted in my storyboard. The approach we took was the easiest, quickest and cheapest way we could think of to do it, and Alisa had all the background paintings done within a couple of weeks. She created the paintings in layers (i.e., sky, cabin, seats, galley, cockpit, etc.) Because Anime Studio Pro recognizes Photoshop layers, I was able to import them as individual ASP layers, which made it really easy to achieve parallax and DOF effects. (I think this is what's being confused as CGI, but these effects are really just simple multi-plane tricks using flat still images in ASP.) The seats in all the shots were animated using only the layer transformation tools in ASP. (Yes, there are a lot of layers in the wide shot of the passenger cabin.)

The cityscapes were handled the same way: we used Google Earth to find the aerial views of Los Angeles that matched what I sketched in the storyboard, and created layered paintings in Photoshop based on the screen caps.

A couple of shots were broken out from ASP using Layer Comps (another awesome feature!,) which were then assembled in Digital Fusion. This was to get specific lighting effects that I couldn't get from ASP alone. The POV shot of the plane flying into the Library Tower in downtown LA is a good example. (Oh, wait--I almost forgot--the 'split-flap' title animation was completely created in Fusion. I guess that was the one other exception besides the airplane shots that wasn't done in ASP.)

None of the characters are cgi of course--just rigged with bones for general body and hair animations and Smart Bones to drive a few morphs (like Toullie's scarf and jacket.) Faces and hands used Switch Layers. The tricky bit was that some scenes required bones to transition to frame-by-frame and back to bones, or have them work simultaneously in the same character. Being able to keyframe the visibility of layers made this possible. The image of Sergeant in the second airplane shot (the cgi scene,) was drawn in Anime Studio and mapped to a transparent polygon.

Have I mentioned how much I like ASP's dynamics engine? The secondary animation on the push cart and the items on the cart was purely an afterthought. I did this only after I learned out how easy it would be to setup using ASP's dynamics.

I'm not saying that making 'Scareplane' was easy work (it wasn't!), but it really wasn't difficult work either. That's because we front loaded the project with a lot of careful planning to make sure things moved along quickly and smoothly once we entered full production mode. IMO, preproduction is the most important stage in any production, if you intend to get things done quickly and inexpensively. (Especially if you also have a day job and a family to raise.)

So, anyway, the use of cgi was actually fairly minimal in the project and used mainly because it saved me a lot of time and trouble for a few relatively straightforward shots. Also, I didn't want to spend a lot of time with 3D because my goal in this project was to learn how to use the 2D tools in ASP.

If I'm not too busy and if enough people are interested, I was thinking of putting together a 'walk-through' video to show the setups for some of the shots. If there's anything in particular you'd like to see, let me know.

G.

The only part I was referring to as 3D was the plane exterior. That's what I assume everyone else meant? That looked like a blurred photo to me. The film as a whole is excellent though. I really enjoyed and liked it.

Oh yes, I'd love to see some info on how you set up shots please

Oh...nevermind.

I'd like to know more about preproduction.