Bunny Blog

A while back…everything blurs together, but maybe it was a year or two ago, we did some animations for the movie “One Day Like Rain,” a feature directed by our good ol’ pal Paul Todisco (who’s written with the likes of Guy Ritchie and practiced Yoga with Madonna!). Well, since that little movie came out, it soldout at Seattle International Film Festival, is headed to a festival in Amsterdam, and recently got reviewed on this website:

http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2008/03/25/My-review-of-One-Day-Like-Rain 

The review features a couple of great stills from our animation sequences.  Quiet Earth is a website that is “dedicated to genre film and everything Post Apocalyptic.”  I find that pretty hilarious.

 Asa directed the animation and drew all the assets. Our process for creating that kind of hand-drawn animation is for Asa to draw the assets on white paper, scan them all in, and then color them in Photoshop.  We compile all the assets and walk cycles in After Effects, and then add any special effects or additional motion in AE. Most of the motion in this piece was done with Asa drawing different frames of action, but sometimes it’s easier to add motion in AE.  For instance, when a character is walking into the distance, instead of drawing different assets to cover 15 seconds of action, you can just create a 1-second walk cycle, set it to repeat, and set the character to get smaller over a period of time.

 Our process for animation is always different, depending on the project. For Jesus & George, I animated everything in AfterEffects, but Asa drew all the assets on a Wacom tablet in Illustrator. Since we were going for a much simpler look, we could get away with drawing one puppet character for each scene.

I’m sure we’ll keep changing and evolving things as we go. Asa wants to use this ToonBoom software for our next animation project.  I’m super excited to use AfterEffects CS3’s new Puppet Tool. We just upgraded, but I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet because we’ve been so busy.