Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we wanted to share this adorable animation by Liz Allmon of Ferrule Fox, in which Solanar presents Aelita with his hand-sewn cloak and facemask, as an apology for “how things went down in Palabar.” (#solita)
Liz writes:
During quarantine, after learning to bake bread and make my own masks, I decided to explore some editing programs to make cute videos for work. I’ve been using photo editing software for the better part of ten years, but learning animation has always intrigued and terrified me. Growing up with Disney, the thought of hand drawing every cell was a tedious task of which I am just not capable. Thankfully, the people at Adobe developed tools for people like me with the attention span of a half ripe avocado. I’ll try not to make this sound like a commercial for Adobe products, but there is a reason they’re an annoying staple in the creative community.
This particular video was my first full animation. I started with a few overlays and simple talking heads before getting into backgrounds, interactions and transitions. Obviously, I haven’t become brave enough to do a walk cycle. In my prior videos, I had to think up a concept, write a script, develop characters, realize I’m not as funny as I think I am, and do fifteen rewrites. Fortunately for this one, the kind folks at Quid Pro Roll handed me a clip from their show so I could just get to the fun part: Storyboarding. Storyboarding is creating a series of stills to show the key shots through the video. This helps an animator plan the different elements, backgrounds, and characters they need to create for later animation. Since I decided to use Character Animator to make my characters speak, my design needed to be simple. Character Animator connects directly with Photoshop to import a character for rigging. Rigging is assigning what parts of the drawing correspond to the human body. Photoshop directly connecting to Character Animator means that any change you save in Photoshop instantly is applied to your Character Animator rig. This is helpful because as I rig my characters, I realize the different parts I want to move or mouth shapes I’m forgetting. This is the most frustrating part as sometimes the eyes refuse to attach to the head or the arms stretch like Mr. Fantastic. Once the character is designed and rigged, the program uses the camera and microphone to capture movement from the animator in real time. My favorite automation is that it allows you to assign different mouth shapes to different letters, input audio, and then the mouth is automatically animated. Obviously, there is some tweaking, but if you’re just looking for a talking head, this is magic. Combine this with the live input from the camera for head movements and keystroke triggers for arm movements, the actual animation of the character takes as long as replaying the audio.
Finally, I combined everything in Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro is a video editing software mainly meant for trimming and combining finished video tracks. This program is what I used for movement across the screen and transition effects. This is done just by creating paths that the objects follow. The calendar drop is the most obvious tracking animation. The starting point for each calendar was recorded with a keyframe then a second key frame was recorded for their ending position. The timing can be changed by sliding the keyframe on the timeline. The swipe from Solanar and Aelita to Eek was a little more complicated as all the elements had to track in unison, but each element has a measurable X and Y value that makes that sort of thing easier. Eeks’s eyes and tail were assigned to paths and looped for quick animation.
All in all, it was quite a learning curve. Things I thought would take a few minutes turned into a few hours, but the online community has run into every problem I came across, so it was a good learning experience. Now, I have Aelita and Solanar set up and ready for future adventures. I will probably redo Eek.
