Thursday, May 1, 2008

Chase Part 1

This sequence was all new material which had not been touched by Ken or Art. It's also full of optical illusions.

same scene: Neil
all: Neil

left: Neil
middle and right, same scene: Dick

left and middle, same scene: Dick
right: Dick
Dick animated all these runs very quickly. First he posed out the contact positions for one leg, plotting out the progression in space. Inbetween those he would draw the contact positions for the other leg, then do the breakdowns for the passing positions, just as he describes it in his book.


left: Dick
middle: Dick
right: Dean
The first scene has a nice trick by Roy, where he utilized the strobing effect of the circles to animate the pattern within. Later in the film Dick asked me to use the same trick to animate the hands of the Witch Mountain when the Thief is flying by.
For the second scene Dick semi-rotoscoped a scene from a Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, I think. I'll try to get a screengrab, hopefully tomorrow.


Dick


same scene: Dean
One of the highlights of the film with a stunning animated camera move. This appears as a long continuous scene without visible cuts, but because of the fast action and foreground elements working as a wipe there were opportunities to divide this into separate scenes. I don't know if that was the case, but it would have made the scene easier to manage.
Dick had used the idea before in Ragged Ann and Andy:...which was in turn directly inspired by Little Nemo:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A visual feast from first scene to last! Holger, wasn't there a 'homage to Escher' story attached to this sequence, where Escher had once wanted to be an animator or something?
Jane

Holger said...

I would love to hear that story, Jane. Maybe we can piece it together here. Does anybody else remember any of this?

Anonymous said...

You're right, it was Duck Soup. I remember spending hours in front of the video printer getting the reference for Dick. I've never been able to watch that film again.
Simon

Anonymous said...

You can see where the reference was taken from Duck Soup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rorkfEu_-w

Watch 2:04-2:12

Holger said...

Thanks guys! I just posted a screen grab from Duck Soup.