WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:02.960 --> 00:00:06.640 Explaining popular animations is nice because you might’ve seen them and wondered how 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:10.490 they were made, but I love digging for treasure. 00:00:10.490 --> 00:00:15.340 The Rainbow Serpent trailer for Army of Frogs is an unopened chest of gold. 00:00:15.340 --> 00:00:21.790 Behold its shininess here. 00:00:21.790 --> 00:00:24.890 The actual animated series came out on Netflix recently. 00:00:24.890 --> 00:00:28.910 I’d be surprised if you’ve seen it, but if you have, it’s pretty obvious that the 00:00:28.910 --> 00:00:31.529 trailer is a completely different caliber of animation. 00:00:31.529 --> 00:00:35.240 (Secret Sauce Studios vs Splash Entertainment) The series is animated in Flash and designed 00:00:35.240 --> 00:00:36.990 for mass episode production. 00:00:36.990 --> 00:00:46.780 The trailer is a highly detailed short feature. 00:00:46.780 --> 00:00:48.839 I love the opening shot in the trailer. 00:00:48.839 --> 00:00:53.719 When I first saw it with my untrained eyes years ago, it was spectacular. 00:00:53.719 --> 00:00:56.370 In reality it’s not complicated. 00:00:56.370 --> 00:00:59.340 The studio paints a background in multiple layers. 00:00:59.340 --> 00:01:03.750 This one is at least three: foreground clouds, mountain, sky and clouds. 00:01:03.750 --> 00:01:07.740 Then, they paint another layer with the brush stroke shapes. 00:01:07.740 --> 00:01:12.320 After that they apply a rainbow effect to the layer and use fading, oval shaped masks, 00:01:12.320 --> 00:01:16.240 and some saturation or level controls to make it pulse like this. 00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:20.570 The shape of the rainbow layer doesn’t change, although it does grow a bit, so I wonder if 00:01:20.570 --> 00:01:24.390 that might be another layer fading in on top of it, or if it’s the result of an effect. 00:01:24.390 --> 00:01:29.350 In the Kulipari trailer the effects and environmental animation is really something else. 00:01:29.350 --> 00:01:34.579 Take this water - it has the anticipation of a rising wave but the crash of a huge tsunami. 00:01:34.579 --> 00:01:38.610 You don’t doubt for a second that the scale of the water is enormous. 00:01:38.610 --> 00:01:40.130 It has weight. 00:01:40.130 --> 00:01:42.390 The lightning rays look great in real time. 00:01:42.390 --> 00:01:46.360 If you slow it down you’d be surprised at how unexpected the sequence of drawings is 00:01:46.360 --> 00:01:55.729 to make the effect look right in real time. 00:01:55.729 --> 00:02:00.710 Unusual shapes definitely apply to fast character animation too. 00:02:00.710 --> 00:02:05.679 The action sequences in the trailer have huge, dynamic poses and perspective shifts. 00:02:05.679 --> 00:02:10.210 When something is changing that fast, you can usually find funny smear frames. 00:02:10.210 --> 00:02:14.220 The purpose of these is to create the illusion of movement between two extremely different 00:02:14.220 --> 00:02:16.220 poses. 00:02:16.220 --> 00:02:21.040 The frog’s leg is here, and then it is all the way over here, a 270 degree rotation from 00:02:21.040 --> 00:02:22.300 the previous spot. 00:02:22.300 --> 00:02:25.240 Here’s the smear frame joining the two. 00:02:25.240 --> 00:02:27.380 Pretty obvious why it’s called a smear frame. 00:02:27.380 --> 00:02:32.130 There’s nothing surprising about the process to make an animation like this. 00:02:32.130 --> 00:02:34.680 Secret Sauce Studios starts with a rough animation. 00:02:34.680 --> 00:02:38.700 They do a second pass with a red line to correct proportions and add details. 00:02:38.700 --> 00:02:40.970 Take that and ink it, with further corrections. 00:02:40.970 --> 00:02:42.110 Add color. 00:02:42.110 --> 00:02:43.260 Add shading. 00:02:43.260 --> 00:02:44.330 Add everything else. 00:02:44.330 --> 00:02:48.110 The last “add everything else” phase is called compositing. 00:02:48.110 --> 00:02:51.420 The cinematic quality of the trailer is worth noting. 00:02:51.420 --> 00:02:53.870 This doesn’t really have anything to do with the animation. 00:02:53.870 --> 00:02:56.870 It’s all about planning out the sequence of events. 00:02:56.870 --> 00:03:01.780 The impact of the slow crawling pan over the scorpion army would be small if we hadn’t 00:03:01.780 --> 00:03:04.390 just watched a bunch of action sequences. 00:03:04.390 --> 00:03:08.600 Butting a fast paced shot up against a slow one makes the difference between the two all 00:03:08.600 --> 00:03:09.960 the more apparent. 00:03:09.960 --> 00:03:13.910 If the trailer were 100% action, we wouldn’t get the drama of the moment at the end, and 00:03:13.910 --> 00:03:18.260 if it were 100% slow panning shots, we’d fall asleep. 00:03:18.260 --> 00:03:19.260 Okay. 00:03:19.260 --> 00:03:20.260 That’s a wrap. 00:03:20.260 --> 00:03:22.970 I’m going to go dig for more gems.