New from Little Green Dog

[Greenlaw]

Action packed end titles created by D.R. Greenlaw and Alisa Loren Klein (a.k.a., Little Green Dog, ) for a film by Keith Allan ('Murphy' of Z-Nation).



The titles were designed and animated last winter (2014-2015) in our home studio in Los Angeles, at Lancer’s diner in Burbank, the Cafe Corner Bistro in Glendale, and the Crowel Public Library in San Marino. (Mostly on a small laptop naturally.)

We used Anime Studio 10 to draw and animate everything except for the ‘heart people’, who were drawn using Procreate on an iPad.

Enjoy!

P.S., If anybody is interested, I can post some concept art, ASP screencaps, the animatic, and a timelapse video from a drawing session.

[Maestral]

Compliments! Looks great and very interesting.
If you`re willing - please do show us the "Making of.."

[Greenlaw]

Thanks! Ask and you shall receive...

Some users had been asking about animation preproduction (design, storyboard and animatic,) and I thought this might make a good learning example.

Until recently, all of my commercial work had been in 3D animation and visual fx production for film, television and video games, but one area I've been itching to get into was 2D cartoon production. So last year, Alisa and I made 'Scareplane' as a way to test new waters. Soon after we posted our short film (created in ASP,) a friend of mine put us in touch with actor/director Keith Allan, who was looking for somebody to design animated titles for his project. Talk about perfect timing.

Keith was looking for someone who could create about 15-30 seconds of animation in a 'Saul Bass' style. After reading the live action script, I felt I could give him something darker and edgier. I knocked out a handful of sketches on my iPad so he could see what I had in mind. Here are three of the sketches I sent him.







Keith loved it, and Alisa and I climbed aboard.

(Continued...)

[Greenlaw]

Keith already had a music track for the titles and he sent it to me the next day. I listened to the track and that was all I needed for inspiration. Soon after, I had drawn the storyboard and edited an animatic to the music track. (The storyboard was drawn in Toon Boom Storyboard, and the animatic was edited in Sony Vegas Pro.)

When we first met, I'd only agreed to about 30 seconds of animation but I wound up drawing over a minute worth of material. Here's what the animatic looked like:



I was pretty jazzed about the project so I told him I wanted to do the full minute. Surprisingly, I didn't have to twist his arm about it.

As you can see in the above video, we stuck to the animatic pretty closely. It's very important to get signed off on the animatic because any changes made after that can derail a whole project. You might have noticed that there were some timing changes--we made the changes on our end because once we began to cut in actual animation, we saw the edit could use a bit of tightening up. That much was expected because our animatic had been thrown together quickly.

(Continued...)

[Greenlaw]

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Before we could start animating, we needed more design work done. What did the crimefighters look like? What did the city really look like? How do we design the show in a way we can animate it quickly but still have a lot of texture and depth? So many questions, so little time. Fortunately, a little bit of research and a few quick thumbnail sketches can answer all these questions and save you a lot of time and money later on.

Oh, and it really helps to talk your partner and the client to make sure you're all on the same page.

Here are some of the early character costumes designs and concept (drawn on iPad with Procreate):



These drawing were loosely based on costumes from the stage production. It seemed like a good place to start but my gut told me the costumes needed to be cooler. The director told me, "Yes, please follow your instincts!" While these costumes were not quite right, the drawings did set the tone for some of the martial arts stuff.



I thought the costumes should be stylish but practical, so I focused on padded armor and sensible shoes. Keith was fine with all that but he insisted on 'sexy' and asked if I could give crimefighters black leather skirts. No problem. One iteration later and we were ready to begin rigging.

(Continued...)

[Greenlaw]

The final version of the costumed characters were drawn in Anime Studio because I wanted to be sure they could be rigged quickly and easily animated. Alisa and I had only ever done Scareplane in ASP before this, and this was a big departure from 'Brudders'. I kinda knew what needed to be done but, to be honest, I wasn't 100% sure if this was going to work. Fortunately, ASP 10 came with that Pirate Girl demo rig for me to reverse engineer. Plus, we had this friendly community of artists to help us figure out some of the technical issues we were facing. (Thank you guys!)

My first thought was to just draw everything in Procreate, Painter or Photoshop and then chop it up for ASP. That approach turned out to be less efficient that I wanted though. I really needed these scenes to run smoothly and quickly on a modestly powered laptop because I mostly worked on this project during my lunch breaks at work and at the public library on weekends, and using 100% bitmapped characters wasn't going to cut it. But I did draw one character that way: The Heart Person. Here's a timelapse of how the character was drawn in Procreate on the iPad.



A layered .psd was exported from Procreate, and the image was chopped up and prepped for rigging in Photoshop. It went well but the rig was slower to animate than I expected. After I added dynamics to make the dangly bits bounce and jiggle, the rig became unusable on the laptop.

(Note: it turns out that there's a bug in ASP 10 that won't allow you disable the dynamics. This is fixed in 11. Besides that issue, dynamics can be significantly slower in 10 that it was in 9.5, so keep that in mind if you haven't upgraded yet. There are still some issues with dynamics in 11 but it's definitely much better and more usable now.)

I decided we needed to stick with ASP's vector graphics if we were going to get this job finished in a timely manner. Fortunately, ASP's vector brushes and fills allowed me to achieve that organic 'grunge' look from the original concept art. Once I worked out a good system, each character was set up as a 'template', ready to import to scenes as needed.

Here's an example of one scene in three stages:



The characters here are fully rigged so they can be posed to match almost any panel in my storyboard. The characters have Smart Bones that allowed us to turn the body and head from front view to profile, independently. As a matter of fact, these rigs are very similar to the Pirate Girl setup from the ASP 10 demo content.



Here's the same scene with the strokes and textures enabled in OpenGL.



And here's the final scene fully rendered and composited.

(Continued...)

[Greenlaw]

Here's a tip: don't over-engineer your rigs!

There are many times where you're character may only do just one thing so it would be silly build a super sophisticated rig for that character. Fortunately, ASP makes it very easy to knock out simple 'one off' rigs that you may only ever need in on scene. Here's an example:



As you can see here, the 'doctor' only has a few bones in his neck and his left arm. That's because, according to the storyboard, all he needs to do is clutch his heart and look sad. Putting any more effort into this rig would be a waste of time.

And that's really the key to finishing a project like this: Be sure to plan every step of the project up front so you don't waste any time once you get started. The storyboard and animatic is your blue print, and everything you need to know about every scene and action should be in there. If you have a carefully thought out storyboard and animatic before you begin animating, you're actually more than half done.

G.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, almost forgot: every bit as as important as the storyboard and animatic is the scene (or 'shot' for cg and live) list and the X-Sheet.



This is a scene list--it lists every scene in the production with information about the duration of each scene is, a brief description, notes and the current status of each scene. Think of it as an overall map of your production. Along the bottom of the scene list, you'll notice tabs for each scene in this production. The tabs are for my X-Sheets.



The X-sheets further break down each scene--right down the the single frames in fact. One quick glance tells you exactly when what happens at exactly what time. If this information was taken from an animatic with sound effects and dialog, that information might be listed here too.

Just as the animatic is created from the storyboard, the scene list and X-sheet is created from the animatic. Why are these important? Because they break down every bit of action, sound and dialog down the exact frame when they occur. This is why the animatic should have a frame counter burned into each scene. This is where I get that info for the X-sheet. Most video editors allow you to add a frame counter to individual clips automatically so setting that up should be easy.

I'm sure there's a way to automatically transcribe that info to a spreadsheet but I just look at the video and type the numbers into my spreadsheet manually--it usually only takes a few minutes to type the info in, and this hand reference can save you hours of guess work once you start animating.

You can use any spreadsheet program for this. Sometimes I use OpenOffice.org but here I used Google Spreadsheet. Either program works well for this purpose and both are free. The advantage with OpenOffice.org is that it's easier to use off-line, and the advantage with Googledocs is that you can access your files from anyplace with an internet connection. It's your choice.

If that sounds like a lot of boring work, well, surprise!, animation is tedious. You have to really love it to want to do it. But if you get all this boring stuff finished up front, you'll find it a lot easier and more fulfilling when you get the fun part. And more importantly, based on your planning, you'll know early on if your project is actually doable in a reasonable time and budget.

I hope this thread has been interesting and maybe even helpful. Good luck and happy filmmaking!

G.

[jahnocli]

Thanks for taking the time out to do this. Much appreciated - and an enjoyable piece of work!

[Little Yamori]

Very Helpful and important to keep in mind for future projects. Thanks for sharing all the details and insights

[neeters_guy]

Outstanding work! Thanks for sharing your workflow details, especially all the preproduction stuff. Very valuable!

Here's a tip: don't over-engineer your rigs!

Truly wise words of advice (although I'm often guilty of this ).

[funksmaname]

Thanks for the full explanation Greenlaw! nice work

[Greenlaw]

Thanks for the nice comments! I'm glad you liked it. I hope this info will help other users towards starting and completing their own productions.

Some users might see the above process as overkill, especially in a single artist studio or for a very tiny crew (like Little Green Dog, which is usually just me and my partner Alisa,) but for us, it's been necessary to get animated shorts done. For example, my personal animation projects can get interrupted often by family and random events of daily living, and sometimes it might be days or even weeks before I can get back to what I was doing. Having a storyboard and animatic, and a detailed scene tracking system helps me quickly pick up where I left off and continue working. Preproduction is really not that much work compared to actual production, and the benefits down the road are well-worth the effort.

And if you happen to be working with more than a couple of people on a project, preproduction and scene tracking becomes even more critical so costly mistakes don't get made.

G.

[lwaxana]

This has great pacing and energy. And the heart people are so adorable!

[djwaterman]

Hey Greenlaw, what are you using to set up your scene list and x list?