Uncanny Alley- Shot making of

Hi all!

Here is a shot breakdown from episode 2 of uncanny alley! And some news at the end...

This shot was one of the longest to do from the series of shorts, it's quite long and fully animated.

The main tricks I used to speed up the animation process as much as possible was using 3d models and using live footage for rooscopy or reference. This shot is a good exemple of how I used those tecniques.

1- Here is my animatic shot, here I tried focus on timing. The model is super simple, this pass is useful to have an overall vision of the film, and length of the shot.

 2- Them I made a video reference of this shot (puking a brain and becoming numb). This helped me had additionnal movements that I wouldn't have thought without reference. Once the video has the good timig, movement and camera angle I used a 3d model head and animated it to match the video reference. I tried mainly matching the mouth movement, and head inclination. This 3d animation was made and animated on blender.

 2- Here I rotoscoped the video and 3d model. I then added the eyes detaching and the brain coming out of the mouth. You can see a weird wobbly line near the character cheek, This served at the coloring stage, in order to automatically color the surface surounded by the line. I had a layer with the head and another with the body.

 3- Here I colored the character in black and white, and added the blood fx and highlights.

 4- Here is the final result as seen on the short film. I added a shadow between the head and the body ( that's why I did one layer for the head one for the body). I also added noise, a slight light flicker and a hand held effect ( all done in after effects).

Hope this post was interesting for you to see how this shot came to be. Let me know if you have questions!

I have been busy with one project in particular for the last month and it will last for at least end of november. In order to make this project I had to create a company/ studio called "Night Door". This studio was created with the help of accountants, producers, lawyers and others. So the last month has been split between writing , drawing and making a lot of calls. I will let you know more about this project soon! But while you wait here is some little rough concept drawings.