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This is Scribble Kibble, a show where an animator talks about animation.
Fancy that!
And oh, have I got a treat for you today.
A treat in the form of...
If you like animation even a little bit and you haven't seen this video, stop here and
watch it now.
Before I get into everything about it that is flipping amazing, I have a little preface
about Gobelins.
Gobelins?
Agh, thank you French,for all those silent letters.
Gobelins is a god-tier school of visual arts in France.
Seriously, if you want to be absolutely mesmerized, find a place where Gobelins posts its student’s
videos, and watch everything.
I have lots of videos from the school I want to showcase, but we’re starting with MORTAL
BREAKUP INFERNO because it is my personal favorite.
The reason is because the premise of “let’s make a breakup as dramatic as possible,”
is illustrated so well by the pacing, the acting, the animation techniques, and the
use of color.
And I can’t resist the symbolism at the very end.
That very last shot.
It screams.
You cannot miss it, especially not with those sound effects.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about now, just come back in a few years.
[laughs] Okay.
An animation like this starts with good planning.
So the team knew it wanted to create a breakup story that starts peacefully, abruptly cuts
to action and gets more and more intense until it snaps and we’re back to peace.
That’s where the pacing comes in.
The toon starts with slow, longer shots, this smooth, slithering away motion of the man,
calm blue colors - and then slam!
The door closes and shot, shot, shot.
Fast pace.
That rhythm starts over again after the title.
Long sequences of looking at the same thing that get cut shorter and shorter until and
we only see each shot for less than a second.
And on top of that we’re getting these insane color schemes.
We go from blues in the beginning to reds to haunted dark blues of the forest and then
- I love this - the colors collapse on themselves until skin is hot pink and trees are primary
colors.
There’s green on the ground.
The colors are set up specifically to make your brain freak out.
Plus there’s loud climactic music, fast motion, and the voice actor is screaming at
this point.
And one frame later it’s the complete opposite.
You’re supposed to feel like you’ve woken up from a nightmare.
It takes all of those elements - not just well drawn character animation - to give you
that feeling.
The acting in this video is great, by the way.
This scene in particular.
You can see that the fisherman is only interested in fishing, just as you can see that the girlfriend
is only pretending to be interested in the fisherman.
What she’s really after is her ex.
It’s acted out both in their body movements and where their eyes are looking.
Watch.
Acting like this is what makes the animation superb, because all we have to do is look
to be able to know how the characters are thinking and feeling.
I’ve got to escape I’ve got to escape I’ve got to You’re mine.
Ha, look at these funny frames I found!
These are smear frames.
They help make fast, exaggerated motions and acting possible.
In terms of technique, MORTAL BREAKUP INFERNO uses 2D character animation on top of 2D backgrounds
and a few 3D backgrounds.
It all begins with concept art.
This is very detailed art that helps the video makers get a sense of the world they are working
with.
Then, the character concept art.
And the character concepts are later turned into model sheets that the animators can look
at to make sure they are drawing the same thing from every single perspective.
At this point after those concepts are done, storyboarding comes into play, and we can
see how the movie should look and be timed when it's finished.
Hah, look at this.
It seems like they had a different ending in mind at first.
And now we get into the hardcore drawing.
First, backgrounds.
In my mind it’s important to at least have these drafted out because you need to animate
your characters with a sense for where the floor and the sky are, so to speak, and whether
or not your person’s going to run facefirst into a tree if they walk left.
While the background artists are painting the final backgrounds and building 3D models,
the animators will take these rough drafts and start animating.
As you can see, basic motion sketches come first.
On top of these roughs the animator draws the most important parts in the animation,
and then they’ll go bark... and then they're go bark?!
Woof!
And then they'll go back and draw every position in between.
MORTAL BREAKUP INFERNO also has shading.
If you’ve ever noticed that a lot of mass produced 2D cartoons don’t have shading,
this is why: you have to animate all of the shading the same way the character is animated.
Which means individual drawings for every piece of shading.
Shading is the bane of my existence.
Then they added flat colors to the animations.
And now is when we get into compositing.
This is where you take your backgrounds and characters and insert them into a program
like After Effects and add filters, light, camera movements, and special effects.
One thing I find interesting is it looks like the lines themselves are done in black, probably
in Toon Boom or something like that.
But when you see the final image, the lines are colored, and some of them are imperfect,
like a paintbrush did them.
I suspect that an animator or colorest updated the line colors, and the texture is either
a line stroke setting in the animation program, or it’s a filter added only to the linework
in the compositing stage.
Slap all of that into a rendering program with the music and sound effects added and
you’re done.
If you want to see more behind the scenes of MORTAL BREAKUP INFERNO, I’ve put some
videos from the artists below.
I’ve already shown some of the pieces from those videos here.
Remember to come back next week for the new show.
Or I’ll be coming for you.
[laughing] Oh, and please leave a tip if you enjoy the show.
Bye~