Friday, September 5, 2008

Thief climbs up Witch Mountain, Part 2

For the BG layouts for these scenes I had to look more and more at my own hands as I didn't have direct Errol reference for the required hand shapes. I just tried to draw the knuckles and finger shapes in Errol's style. As mentioned in the last post all these scenes just came with minimal indications of a general rock outline, just enough for a rough linetest.
Scene 5x never made it into the released version, but it's in the Recobbled Cut. Scene 7x was cropped for the released version and in his Recobbled Cut Garrett Gilchrist composited added image information on the sides, from a copy of the work print I guess.

seq.10.1/sc.5x, 10-08 feet, finished on April 14, 1991
seq.10.1/sc.6x, 10-11 feet, finished on April 24, 1991
seq.10.1/sc.7x, 13-01 feet, finished on May 1, 1991
The approach for reworking Ken's Thief was similar to what I described in the last post for sc. 4x. The kicking action for the Thief in sc. 7x was fun to do, a bit different than Ken had it. I did the feet on ones as partial drawings because there was a lot of favoring in the spacing, overlap on the feet and arcs to consider. Hilary Denny who was assisting on these scenes would finish the inbetweens of the head, torso, upper arms and hands according to the charts. When things were moving I would work on 2s, in slow parts on 4s, trying not to leave more than 3 inbetweens between my drawings. Once all the drawings were done I would go back in and animate the drapery straight ahead on twos and give it back to her to finish. Once everything was on ones and approved by Dick I would animate the flies straight ahead on ones, like a flipbook. I used a pegbar with high pegs and could put 16 drawings on there. I color coded the flies and worked in groups of 5, doing maybe 4 passes to get up to 20 or so. I delivered my scenes clean up on ones. The drawings were hand traced onto cel. They could have rough lines from color erase pencil underneath, usually rubbed down a bit as long as there was a clear black pencil line that could be traced. The tracing would reflect each drawing exactly. The tracers worked unbelievable accurate. So on one hand you have more freedom in your work flow. It was OK to have the inbetweened part of the drawings slightly lighter, possibly just pencil and other parts darker with color underneath were I roughed out the feet and the drapery in maybe more than one pass, leaving rubbed down traces of the other attempts. Clean up for digital painting is much more unforgiving in this. On the other hand our drawings were the final statement for the animation. Any wobble, inconsistencies in volume or being slightly off model would show up on screen. The animator had that responsibility and that was not a bad thing...

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