Welcome to Scribble Kibble, an animation show about how animations are made.
I’m going to dig into my animation pile for something that will make an easy, straightforward
episode.
Maybe something 3D?
Like 3D is ever straightforward.
Oh I know, Gorillaz Spirit House.
That’s 3D, I think.
Let’s do that one.
Check the link below.
Wait! Wait.
Wait.
I’m going to give you the link to the 360 version.
If you’re watching on your phone, hold your phone up and turn around to look around the
environment.
On a computer, click and drag around on the video screen or use WASD keys.
Or put on your VR headset.
Go!
Now, satisfy my curiosity.
Did you try to stay focused on the characters, or did you end up looking around at everything
else?
I stared at the sky for the last minute to see if anything happened.
If you found your eyes wandering, that is the major problem with animating movies in
360, let alone Virtual Reality.
How do you keep people watching the story?
Ha!
Trick question, you can’t.
You can’t force someone to stay focused in a true free-to-wander environment.
For that reason, traditional storytelling doesn’t work.
Watch the regular version of Spirit House and it’s a completely different experience
than the 360 version.
There’s a level of editorial control in the flat version that you won’t get in the
360, just like there are fully rotational spaces you can look around in 360 that you
don’t see in the flat version.
I mean, geeze, in the 360 version you might not see the first minute of the animation
because you end up looking around the train car you’re stuck in.
Is one better than the other?
Not really.
They’re just different.
See, the 360 version is designed so that even if you do wander, you still get the magical
trippy music video experience.
Especially in the asteroid field.
You can enjoy the music and watch those fruity pebble rocks float by.
Like almost every other Gorillaz animated music video, everything about Spirit House
is superb.
Both the 2D and 3D animations are top quality.
The textures on the 3D environments could fool you into thinking this is a stop motion
set.
Look at this.
Looks like tiny little props made in the real world.
And the set artists couldn’t just do whatever they wanted - their art had to fit inside
the limitations of Google Spotlight to look good in 360 YouTube.
All this pizazz comes with a price tag, though.
800,000 dollars.
Woo!
One particularly interesting thing to me is how the snake monster’s mouth appears to
be a movie clip projected onto the 3D model.
In other words, an animated texture.
The flat, violently ugly mouth is pretty horrifying.
There’s at least one scene where the 2D animated characters clip through the 3D characters.
Whoops.
This is probably the 3D character animator wanting to keep the monster centered in the
shot and look like it’s shouting in Russel’s face.
The clipping would go away if the 3D model were moved up a bit.
You’re trying to keep a 2D piece of paper art with fake depth from intersecting something
with real depth.
It’s a fun dance of planning, layer stacking, and masking.
If you’re thinking of making a YouTube 360 video yourself, this is what you do.
Either buy a camera that can record in 360, or get software to stitch together videos
to make a 360 degree setting.
Then, download a YouTube application that will apply metadata to the video to enable
360 degree compatibility.
Upload it.
It sounds deceptively simple.
There’s plenty of bad or mediocre 360 videos, where you can see the seams where videos were
stitched together, or where the depth of field sucks and you feel more like you are looking
at a ring of video that surrounds you, rather than standing in the environment itself.
For 360 animations, you need to design them in 3D.
In Spirit House, the 2D characters are placed inside a 3D program.
The artists could have also drawn the 2D surfaces for everything in the backgrounds, and set
those drawings up in the 3D environment to create an animation that would stylistically
look like it was pure 2D.
No matter what style you’re using, in the end everything has to go through a 3D program.
Otherwise the 360 video will look like
a cylindrical, but flat, painting.