Who Am I Message

For this particular project I was commissioned by the LDS Church, in particular the Birmingham section to animate a short call to action message titled 'who am I?' The project was headed my the stake multimedia specialists who had created a script, and the voice over that I would animate to.

When I initially met with the client we discussed the tone, atmosphere and narrative structure of the piece. We decided that the animation due to the nature of the voiceover and script should have a peaceful, uplifting feel with the goal to inspire and call others to action. It's should, as such be scored with appropriate uplifting music of a classical nature with a slow build as the animation rolled on. The art style in question should have a hand drawn illustrative feel with shining textures and imperfections that one would find in ink and biro sketches. The piece should also have no colour save for the end card that would be in the LDS blue with the text in white reading LDS.ORG

With all this in mind I set about planning the designs for the various backgrounds and characters that would appear in the piece. I Decided that for the animation technique in particular I would use a stylised rotoscoping technique where I would use stock footage, and my own footage and animate over them in a stylised manner with strong outlines , hatching, and squash and stretch techniques. I would also lower the framerate to around 10 fps to create a movement reminiscent of old 1920s animation. As such I looked I to the works of Max Fleischer who pioneered the technique and famously rotoscoped over famed singer Cab Calloway in multiple Betty Boop shorts. I also looked at the work of Ralph Bakshi who used rotoscoping techniques when making the 1978 animated adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. I researched these two in particular to see how they achieved the movement of their characters, how they sold the more fantastical elements alongside it, and how they approached their workflow.

I Also looked into more stylised lo fi artwork, to see how they drew characters using simple linework techniques to create key details, strong silhouettes, texture and shading. I Then created a mood board of these various artworks and got to work on some stylised character concepts.

Once these character concepts were complete I moved on to creating stylised backgrounds based around what was being said in the voiceover and adjusting them based on the tone and emotiveness of the words being spoken. For certain shots I created custom transitions to more easily dictate the flow of the animation allowing for smoother changes between scenes.

After the backgrounds were completed I moved on to filming scenes and gathering stock footage ready to be rotoscoped over. Then I moved on to animating. For this I used photoshop converting the imported video frames to layers then, after rotoscoping over them using the timeline feature to create a frame by frame animation. When animating I set the frame rate to 10FPS to further accentuate the hand drawn hand animated nature through the jitteriness seen in the movement of the characters. I also blended into the background various stock paper and ink textures on a loop to further sell the hand drawn feel of the piece and to make it feel more personal.