A Dog's Life - teaser trailer released

[toonpang]

I love it!! The style is great, super charming, feels well produced and makes me want to see more!

For a teaser it sure got me interested.

When can we see more?!?

-Kevin

[supergrover]

Is this a joke? Over a third of the trailer is black screen and then there's a shot of a dog looking out the window. Scintillating! I hope it's a joke!

[victor throe]

no...its not a joke. its a teaser. ie, doesnt give anything away. except that its about a dog and what it gets up to when you are out.

i would love to have put more into the teaser, but i havent actually made the film yet.

not even started in fact.

the artwork you see in the teaser wont even make it into the final film. it was a dry run to wet my fingers with the techniques to be employed in the film. to get to grips with the aesthetic, to get a feel for line weight ect.

and when you consider every single frame of the animation if crafted individually, by hand, with a pencil, at 25 frame per second. i think i have been quite generous :)

at least it features the main character. how many blockbuster film teasers have you seen over the years which actually showed you nothing at all except maybe a fling logo?

[victor throe]

heres a section of the tutorial off my site.

some of you traditional animators may find it interesting. some of you beginner compositors may find it interesting. some of you more experienced compositors may think its crap and know of a much better method for doing it. those comments are especially welcome.


Once the shot is animated, scanned, coloured etc. it is time to export them ready for compositing. Here you can see the 4 versions of the character that were exported. Later we will look at how each version is used in obtaining the final aesthetic.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer001.jpg

With our character layers in our favourite compositing package, the first thing we need to do is a little cleanup and refining. You can see from this next picture that there are some alpha channel artefacts. These little white dots are from where the fill tool didn’t quite go into all the little corners. Generally these will not be noticeable, but cleaning them up will have another added advantage which I will get to later.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer002.jpg

I have applied a simple matte choker to our colour characters aplha channel. Observe the settings.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer003.jpg

These settings ‘bloomed’ the alpha channel. Depending on your settings, it will expand the alpha channel filling in the gaps, but also pushing out the boundary. The boundary to the alpha channel is now much more uniform and smooth.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer004.jpg

The problem we now have is that because the alpha channel has expanded beyond the boundary of our line work, we now have a white halo effect. This is because the surrounding image is white by default. But this is easy to fix.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer005.jpg

[victor throe]

Firstly I have created a new layer the same colour as our line work.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer006.jpg

Then duplicated the colour character and REMOVE the matte choker.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer007.jpg

With the character version WITHOUT the matte choker and the brown layer selected, we ‘nest’ them to effectively create a character layer without a white surround, but a brown surround.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer008.jpg

With our new ‘pre-composed’ or ‘nested’ layer selected;
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer009.jpg

We can use the above character layer with the matte choker applied as a track matte.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer010.jpg

[victor throe]

In this image you can now see that our character has improved exterior line quality, and extra thickness. This removes a great deal of the ‘line boil’ too. I have stuck him against a blue background for easy viewing.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer011.jpg

Next we need to work on the lines themselves. We have dragged our line export down on top.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer012.jpg

Then I created a white layer and used the line work as an inverted matte.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer013.jpg

Then created a track matte off our matte version..
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer014.jpg

This gives us a white version of the line work only.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer015.jpg

[victor throe]

Then I create a black layer beneath the white line work, and pre-compose or nest them into their own layer.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer016.jpg

I can now go within this ‘nest’ or composition and blur the line work and duplicate them to give me the desired line thickness. The beauty of this is that you can re use the file for different character and shorts, but depending on how close to camera etc, you can increase or reduce the number of line duplicates, giving you control of how thick the lines are without redrawing anything.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer017.jpg

With a new brown layer created I can go ahead and use the new line work layer as a track matte. And this is the result.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer018.jpg

For the purpose of this shot however, the lines neednt be so thick, so I just go back into the ‘nest’ and reduce the number of line work layers.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer019.jpg

The next stage was to create a CG version of the collar tag. I didn’t fancy animating the word Busta every frame so it was quite simple to go into a 3d app and create the tag. This has the added benefit of allowing the animator to add subtle changes to the lighting and colour of the tag depending on orientation. It also means a subtle shift in the tags movement can imply breathing or figiting which helps to keep the shot and the character alive. Even though you don’t see it in this shot, it just had to be done. Here is the bump map for the tag.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer020.jpg

[victor throe]

And here is the brassy grime map for the render.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer021.jpg

Within the 3d app, you can see that I used a simple plane for the tag. This had the added benefit of giving me some ‘bleed’ around the edges as I knew I wasn’t going to have animated a perfect ellipse by hand. Just to clarify, yes it would have been simpler to just animate a complete CG tag but I didn’t want it to be overly obvious that it had been done by CG. Subtlety was the key word here.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer022.jpg

The tag render was put behind the line work of course.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer023.jpg

Here it is with the grime layer added.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer024.jpg


Then using the tag mask layer we rendered, we can easily cut our 3d render out and it will fit snuggly into the character.
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer025.jpg

[victor throe]

See…
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer026.jpg

And here is our final character. All put together and ready to go into our shot. So lets do that…
http://www.evilassin.com/collective/files/trailer027.jpg

[seven6ty]

Ah, think we were all expecting this to be the new Disney movie, "A Dog's Life".

[victor throe]

i have done a quick search...i havent found anything relating to disney doing a film called a dogs life

ill sue their ass if they have copied me ;)

this story and title has been kicking around in my head for years

pleeease tell me disney arent doing a film of the same title

[seven6ty]

Ah, nevermind, their new one is "American Dog"

http://www.jimhillmedia.com/mb/articles/showarticle.php?ID=1580

Heh, sorry, I could've sworn it was "A Dog's Life".

[victor throe]

ahg

you had me worried for a minute

i was a frantic google searching fool

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