“Hisko had a pretty strong vision and there was a pretty distinct visual look from his original drawings. Staggs shared that there was very little preliminary work before they dove into Undone. Does it work emotionally for him? Does it work technically for Submarine? Are we all happy with what we're conveying? The micro-expressions are our bread and butter, so we want to make sure that stuff is right on.” And then we go through it with Hisko Hulsing, the director, who’s also based in Amsterdam. With regard to how creative decisions are made during this process, Swope said that she and Staggs check the animation before it’s sent to Submarine to make sure that “we’re getting the emotion we want and that we’re not having any technical problems, like lines wiggling when they shouldn't. When they’ve completed the line work, it gets sent to Submarine Animation in Amsterdam, who adds color and composites all of the elements, including the oil paintings that are used as background art. Turning from the details of their creative approach to where they fit into the production workflow, Swope explained that they’re the second step after the live-action footage is shot and edited. A lot of animation houses just work really, really hard for realism and they try to eliminate the motion blur, while we kind of embrace it as a photographic, a cinematographic artifact.” “And we do an interesting thing at Minnow Mountain in our approach to a motion, where we’ll draw motion blur, and we'll squash and stretch out a character within a scene. “We do a lot of small character adjustments – you might slightly age a character, or change something about their appearance,” she contined. So the term can be used for both things, which is why we prefer the term ‘performance capture’ – because what we're really doing is working with an actor to create a performance.”
#DID ARCANE USE MOTION CAPTURE SOFTWARE#
This is different from technical rotoscoping in a superhero movie, where you're using pixels and software to track an area for compositing. “We do what we call performance capture rotoscoping, which is hand-drawn frame by frame, with the animator working to portray the emotional part of the story through the drawings. “There's an important distinction between creative rotoscoping and technical rotoscoping,” Staggs explained. Their sensitive and nuanced performance capture animation in Tower caught the eye of the producers of Undone, includin g executive director Tommy Pallotta, with whom Staggs had previously worked on Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, and they were invited to join the creative team.ĪWN recently caught up with Swope and Staggs, who talked about the challenges and triumphs of working on Undone, and discussed the finer points of rotoscoping – beginning with what distinguishes their work from other rotoscoping efforts. Minnow Mountain was co-founded by Steph Swope and Craig Staggs in 2012, when they began work as animation producer and director, respectively, on Tower (2016), an Emmy-winning feature documentary about the 1966 University of Texas shootings. Co-created by BoJack HorseMan creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and writer Kate Purdy, and starring Rosa Salazar and Bob Odenkirk, Undone is the story of a woman who finds she has a new relationship with time after surviving a near-fatal auto accident.
#DID ARCANE USE MOTION CAPTURE SERIES#
Now Austin-based animation studio Minnow Mountain has achieved new heights for rotoscoping in their work for Undone, Amazon’s first original animated series for an adult audience. More recently, director Richard Linklater used the technique in his ambitious features Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). cartoons, and such landmarks as the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Ralph Bakshi’s animated features of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Invented by animator Max Fleischer in 1915 and used extensively in his innovative Out of the Inkwell series, rotoscoping has been employed in Disney films, classic Warner Bros. Rotoscoping – a process that allows animators to convert live-action footage to hand-drawn animation – has been around for more than century.
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