Existential Predator
This was my final project for my Motion Graphics class. The assignment was to make a 30 second promotional spot on some aspect of yourself that had mixed mediums in it. The idea of doing America’s Most Wanted meets Nihilism seemed funny at the time so I went with it. The crayon girl is from a fairy tale called The Girl Whose Parents Turned Into Dragons…the title says it all, unfortunately it’s not finished yet but hopefully over the next year or so I’ll slowly be able to finish it (it will involve thousands of crayon drawings). The Gingerbread Man is a puppet superhero that also appeared in the animation The Gingerbread Man and The Gingerbread Slums.
Method:
This was a lot of fun to make. I had used my mid-term in this class to test the crayon girl and how to put 3d Animations in a different environment so a lot of this project was just executing those in a story telling fashion. The crayon girl is all hand drawn with crayons, I drew about three frames for each mouth position and six for her resting position, all this 3 times over because of the different angles. I then color keyed out the paper and put blurry white disks behind her eyes and her mouth (she looked really odd with see through mouth and eyes). When drawing her I actually printed out an image of the scene she was in and then used a lightboard to draw on top of the picture, this helped me get it so she looked like she was actually sitting on the chair (though each angle took 10-20 attempts to get it to look right). I actually used a black colored pencil for her outline (it gave her outline more definition than a black crayon would have) and then filled everything in with crayons. I did some color correction in post, but mostly just to dull the colors on her so it looked like it was lit by a florescent light.
As for the Gingerbread Man I rendered out a 2k version of his animation and then worked on getting him to look like he was in his scene. I used HDRI lighting from a florescent room to get him to have the right light, then I actually desaturated him a lot. To give him less of a focused feel I did some work with masks to make it so his edges looked blurred (which is how they would look you were seeing him in real life and he wasn’t 3d rendered). Finally I worked on his shadow, there’s actually two different shadows so that it plays back onto the chair correctly.