Find My Sixpence

Here’s a subversive Christmas animation that follows on from last year’s What’s Up Your Cracker.

Animation and stupid voice by me, Louis Hudson. Sound by Pete Styles.

Despite the photorealistic textures, the character animation is mostly 2D, drawn in Adobe Animate in order to get the gloopy weight of the character. As the action is fast and it literally collides with live action footage the animation was animated at 25fps.

My production pipeline normally involves bringing in layers from Animate to After Effects for compositing and livening up in some form. In this case I took it a bit further and used the characters separate layers as series of masks to allow to get a lot of depth and texture into the animation.

The eyes were animated in After Effects, partly because it was easier, but also so they could work as tracking points for the texture I was adding to the body. A bit of forced motion blur added on top made the whole body look seamless while still keeping a 2D animated charm.

A load of After Effects tricks were added afterwards to fill out the scene, add some texture, give the liquid more realistic translucency, and create a more interesting camera look.

On a side note, I always think camera moves should be treated with the same thought process as any character animation. What’s the camera operator thinking? What are they reacting to? How professional are they?