THE MAKING OF
by Carlos Lascano
4. SOFTWARE & EQUIPMENT.
The most important "equipment" I work with is human resources. We were extremely tight on our schedule so the team completely devoted to the project and forgot about weekends (and night sleep!) for a month.
As in hardware equipment, we used APPLE MAC PRO / MACBOOK PRO / SONY HVR V1 / NIKON D80 and D70s (18-70mm nikon lens) CINTIQ 12W. Blackmagic Intensity Card.
And for software, the basics: Adobe Photoshop, CS4 Adobe After Effects CS3, Apple Final cut Pro, iStop Motion.
5. TECHNIQUE.
The gathering and organization of all material is what usually comes first to avoid becoming crazy in the weeks to come. All photographs were "cleaned" in Photoshop and all shot material was masked in After FX and Photoshop prior to its proper organization in folders.
The characters were by far the most consuming thing to do: not only designing them according to the characteristics of the given period of history, but also replacing their drawn face for real photographed skin texture. It was like assembling a tiny puzzle: real skin can have so many different textures in an inch square, that the task became quite titanic.
Once each character had its own skin, the costumes (that were prior designed in textured paper and photographed) were completed adding extra textures and color. The last thing to do before starting the animation was to attach the eyes and the hands to each one of them. They were finally done...
The backgrounds were a bit easier, but took a lot of time as well. Once the cardboard sets were worked and detailed in Photoshop, and all the real textures added, the rest of the space to fill was hand painted.
As I did on my previous projects, all elements were placed on a 3D space in After Effects. That allowed me to create camera movements that achieved more depth.
After I had completed the basic keys for the animation, I started making some tests to show the client.
Once I got their approval, I moved on.
3. SHOOTING ACTORS.
In addition to what I did with real eyes in "A short love story...", this time I wanted to add some more human gestures and decided to experiment on hands. At first I had doubts about how would a real hand "feel" on a body that has been drawn, but after some testing I finally got what I wanted... as long as I kept the real skin "surrounded" by organic textures, it seemed to work well.
All the team and the actors practically moved to the studio for a weekend, to shoot the eyes and hands. The final characters had already been designed and placed on the design of each frame , so we had to be very careful in adjusting the motion and the angle of the features we were about to shoot.
Each actor had a particular eye and hand movement, and as easy as it sounds, it took a lot of time and effort to achieve what we needed.
The shooting of the actors took place over a chroma key at the studio, and the shots were directly recorded into the hard drive to achieve as less compression rate as possible.
The original sketch and the final rendered image (some characters were left out from the final spots)
