REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN

So, this is a project I'm doing at uni currently where the animators get teamed up with one or two of the illustrators to basically direct and animate some of their work. The illustrators produce and design the constituent elements of the film, and then the animators are responsible for the overall look. It's a really interesting project, because there's a lot of confusion on both sides of the divide as to who needs to do what and how (a lot of people seem to have been teamed up with people whose "style" they don't even like) - some people are just cutting up drawn elements and animating them in After Effects like a puppet, others are taking the illustrators' drawings as just character designs which the animators are redrawing entirely in Flash or on paper.

I paired myself up with my two good buddies Marta Dlugolecka and Justine Howlett. Marta has a thing with making these little models of famous people (photographed beautifully here), so I figured I'd try a little stop-motion with them, telling the story of a little toy superman in a library. Justine has been responsible for making the set entirely from scratch, and I think it looks great. The method of animation is kind of weird for me - there's no real inbetweening, and the models aren't poseable - I just got Marta to make like 20 of these little supermen models in key poses and I'm just animating between them. I also had her make a small cape for him out of a wire modelling mesh then covered in red fabric, which really helps accentuate his movement and makes it look really continuous.


Here's Marta with a bunch of her as-yet-capeless-and-featureless Supermen. They're so sweet all together!


Justine trying out one of the key poses on the set. It's kind of weird here, because I usually just animate on my own, but I've tried to involve the girls as much as possible even in the latter stages.


The setup we have is cosy - they cornered off a section of the animation room for us with big foam walls so the outside light won't interfere with the shooting, and the camera's mounted on those big pillars they have in there (and as such is essentially immobile).


This is something like what the final video looks like. At some point there'll be a big reveal and the silhouetted "city" will turn out to be just a library. Do ho ho!