Fancy Names

DreamWorks Storyboarding Tips by Rob Koo. 

For Pearl’s song “It’s Over isn’t it?” the scene is about Pearl accepting a loss. As the series has progressed, she’s learned that she isn’t always right, and that there are things about herself that she’s has to reevaluate. This all comes to a sort of climax in this scene where she accepts and admits out loud that her relationship with Rose was never as deep and complete as she wanted it to be or told herself it was. This is where she’s left at the end of the scene, feeling lost and out of place.

In the outline written by Ben Levine and Matt Burnett, this is how the scene looked:

You’ll notice a lot of things ended up changing compared to the final version. Most of that was due to time constraints. When we started storyboarding the episode, all of the rough demos of the songs were recorded so that we had an idea of the amount of time we had between each song (which ended up not being very much). The result was that we had to basically be transitioning constantly between songs, but doing it in a way that felt natural and as gentle as possible.

In addition, Rebecca remembered a part from the 1982 movie “Victor Victoria” starring Julie Andrews that she wanted to use as reference for the feeling of the scene:

Right away we latched onto this spinning 360 degree camera move. I loved the energy and focus it gave to the character and I immediately roughed out a version with Pearl.

If you’re ever stuck during a scene this is what you do: Don’t start from the beginning, find the moment you see clearest in your mind and build out from there. From these rough thumbnails I built the rest of the scene outward. I brought back motifs like her sword skills and her dance style to help evoke the past events of the series, and I tried to give as much time as I could to each shot and make her acting as expressive a possible.

Below are my rough boards set to Rebecca’s demo. At the end, i added a pause for when she throws the Rose into the air. It felt like a good spot for things to crescendo ring out. Deedee Magno Hall’s rendering of this blew us all away when we heard it.

From there clean up was pretty much straight forward. The scene didn’t change much except for tweaking her acting here and there. I’m super proud of how this scene turned out, hats off to Nick DeMayo our animation director and to the team at Sunimin in Korea where they draw the entire episode on paper:

Glad to share what we’ve been up to with my associate Omar. We’re making the remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap

Stills and artworks from “Funan, the new people” pilot film (Funan, le peuple nouveau) french animated feature film by Denis Do.

This movie is inspired by Denis’s mother personal story, that takes place during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia.

1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

Hi everyone, Not a single post since January ! I was really busy working on this short film.  I hope you’ll like it !

It was Done during the Gobelins/Calarts Exchange program. It was an amazing experience ! 

Music by Antoine Duchêne http://www.antoineduchene.com/

Sound design by Ben Huff