WIP - Magic Folks Shot

So i’ve worked on this over the past few days (or week?) and shared my progress over at the discord, but I basically started this thing on a whim on RoughAnimator. Also I realized I did something similar to this 2 years ago already! https://www.patreon.com/posts/wip-0107-19346763

While this shot was only 2 seconds, I feel like I took my time making this

It all started with this rough where I was playing around the idea of them getting ready to fight something haha. Not much frames here, where Jack had like 6 frames and Ela having around 8 I think. The rest I just made a loop to extend the duration. I wanted to go for a limited look so I tried to use as little frames as I can in selling an action.

Since these were like super few frames I just decided to clean and color it up. I think I’ve gotten a bit used to RoughAnimator’s wonky brush engine.

Coloring was a breeze too. Really happy I didn’t give these guys too many colors lmao

At this point, I was in too deep now so I just played around with fx animation. I had to make 2 attempts until I was satisfied with the second one. Didn’t need to make a sketch layer for this as it’s pretty easy to clean up abstract stuff.

This wouldn’t look as cool without some lighting so I made some shadows and light shapes that I can mask when I load this up on After Effects.

With the lines, colors, fx, shadows, and light layers, I made a quick background and slapped them all on After Effects. I used a mix of ramps, gaussian blurs, and color dodge modes to achieve my lighting. As for the texture on the effects, I generated some animated fractal noises which I laid on the effects. I also had to key animate some colors on the lighting so that they match the positions of the effects. Add a little camera zoom out and I was set!

It was nice seeing it all come together but that amount of time for just this 2 second animation. It’s....a lot of work haha.

Anyway, gonna close this with the BG i made for this. It was also a small r&d in figuring out how to ink/color layouts for animation.