I was to asked animate some scenes for the excellent BBC comedy series, Funboys. The scene takes its cue from The Lion King, but with less budget and in a style that fits the tone of the show. I also pitched some combinations of prosthetics, puppetry, 3D face filters, but we landed back on 2D.
In the end I handled most of the elements of the scene from concept to delivery. I storyboarded the scene to help technical supervise the filming. I did the designs, animation, cloud FX and compositing myself, which wouldn’t be ideal on a larger project, but for this it simplified the amount of back and forth required to marry the character animation and VFX.
Here’s the VFX breakdown:
First, I designed and animated Tiernan The Pig against locked off shots, making sure to match eye levels between cuts. Then the camera shake and movement was added.
The still clouds were created by drawing several layers in the shapes that I needed. Photoshop’s generative tool turned those into photorealistic looking clouds. (About as ethical as AI generation gets I reckon).
The clouds were animated mostly using: scaling, warping, blur, and turbulent displacements. The rays were made with Crate’s Godrays plugin.
Then a bunch of trickery pokery went into composite it all together. Hopefully I never have to open that After Effects project again.
