Walk the line

I was trying to find a procedural way of adding some shading and bleeding to my animation line, to give the impression of ink that has sat on the paper for ages. Even though, at the time of the film, the maps would have been brand new. I guess it's for the same reason that all medieval films have castles in them that look ancient and ruined, though they would have been new back then. Here are some mockups illustrating the various stages to make fill, line and shadow-matte into the final image...

Derigibles

For some bizarre reason this film ended up containing 3 items that I am particularly fond of. Mr Darwin, the Dodo and Zeppelins. I happen to have a 3 foot model of the Hindenburg in my living room, held up by strings rather than hydrogen in order to avoid mishaps... Here is an early attempt to make a flight cycle in Flash. I was trying to get it to look fake 3D, I think it worked...

Zeppelin from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Linetests

While working out of my friend "Uli's" studio in Camden, I kept sending "linetests to the aardmanners, to keep them updated. Here are 2 of them, "Windrose" and "Poseidon".

PoseidonLinetest1 from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Windrose linetest from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Camera-moves

The transition from Stop motion into the first scene of the "London calling" sequence was supposed to have a camera move on it. The footage of the boat was however already shot and there was no material at the head to facilitate such a move. This is the animatic from those happy times when I still believed the move could be done...

windrose from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Girls with fishtails

Here is a quick cycle of a mermaid that you may be able to see in the movie if your eyes are quick enough... I used them to spiff up the journey to Panama, but due to speed of editing and motion blur, the little creatures are just as likely to be seen in this shot, as they are in the wild... but, you can see one here.

mermaid2 from Felix Sputnik on Vimeo.

Raphus Cucullatus

The movie happens to have as it's real hero a bird that is so close to my heart that mere coincidence should not be able to explain the fact that Dodo movie meets Dodo nut by sheer serendipity. But, as I am not superstitious, randomness can be the only explanation... Here is a picture of my home-made umbrella and the window in our front door.

Ginormous files

As I was beginning to set up backgrounds for the "London calling" sequence, the files quickly exceeded the 2 gigabyte limit of Photoshop documents and I had to begin saving them as PSB files (Photo Shop Big?). As you may be able to ascertain from the images below, with the right hand framing of a scene being at least 2000 pixels wide, the entire map would be more than 20000 pixels by 9000 pixels to satisfy the requirements of a cinema resolution (2k) artwork. I therefore decided to strategically split the sequence up into overlapping segments that could be handled during compositing. Those elements could than be mapped onto a 3D surface and make up the path followed by the camera. As most transitions were cuts, rather than camera moves, the transitions could be hidden and the whole sequence looked like one continuous move on a giant map. I hope the sequence of images below illustrate the setup of the background and the arrangement of the individual scenes. No paper was harmed in the making of these artworks, it's all digital.