Higgedy-Higgedy-Highlights!

More progress. This time, I'm adding highlights to my work. Start with the background, poorly executed in Photoshop because you just learned about textures.


Throw down the character. If you have a dramatic scene and you want these highlights to pop, your character is gonna have to be what professionals call low key (or a low value). It's important not to just take the character and pull the value down, or just take the colors and darken them. It's important that the colors preserve their proper relationships, so that might mean dropping saturations or pumping them up a bit. I dropped the saturation of the pilots helmet and lips because they would've been far too saturated, and pumped up his arms because yellow gets really desaturated at low values. Anyway, I'll do a more labored post later about colors, but it's still important to try to think about these things.


Highlights are on a separate layer. I find the color I want, and then set the layer to a low opacity. As with all the highlights, they will be flickering so the amount of opacity range you have really depends on the scene.


Then finally, I do the same for reflected light on the front. What's important is that these highlights should help to really wrap around the form. When I have them roughed in, I usually select the highlights and hit smooth a couple times just to make sure they look clean.


I'm a big fan of classical lighting, and I hope to exploit more techniques like this. Of course, this is just a frame of the scene, but you get the general principle of how I pull stuff like this off.

Composites

Lots of stuff going on. Between a haircut, my first gig, going back to school, and being a scumbag in general, I've managed to fit some time in on my film. I'm compositing the character into the BG's right now, then I plan on animating the effects to make it look purdy.







So that's what's crappening. Who wants to see some traditional cartoons again?!

Oh, also, I'd like to plug animator David Gemmil's new toon. You can check it out here! I really like David's style and he's doing cartoons on his own. Props, David!

A More Colored Post...

Got some more BG's painted and threw some color on some of the digitized frames too.








Stone Hudson after mexican cuisine night at my college cafeteria.

A couple of layouts for your filthy eyes.

Here's some rough pencil layouts, done before the rough animation obviously.







And here's a little color to wet your appetite.

TRADITIONAL ANIMAITON IS BACK!

...and your animation peers told you that 2D was dead! Balderdash! Hogwash! Haberdashery!

Here are some of my animation roughs that are kinda tied down for my upcoming picture. I tried to Photoshop out the blood and sweat stains. All other stains are purely on purpose.



BLUR! Thanks Chuck Jones!






Check back every hour on the hour for updates. I hope to finish this film within the week, and color the animation/BG's, composite it, etc. etc. If I'm feeling chipper afterwards, I hope to do a whole series of explanatory videos explaining how I'm doing what it took a studio of 150 people to do in the 1930's. Then when anybody tells you that animating on paper is too much work, you'll know better and you can bite your thumb in their general direction, the lazy bastards.