The Making Of

"The paintings we wanted to animate were imported in the TAB to be used as reference. As we needed to animate each element of the painting separately, first we created many levels made of a single drawing, one for each element."

"To animate the painting components we used a lot the inbetweening feature, that helped us to create smooth shape interpolation. Basically we worked in this way: we created a copy of the first drawing, modified it with tools such as Pinch and Magnet, inserted empty frames and interpolated the two drawings to obtain missing ones. In most of the cases the work was automatically done in this way, especially for secondary elements. In other cases we wanted to control better the animation, so we made corrections manually in some drawings. To keep the animation smooth we kept on using the inbetweening, even for sub-range of drawings."

A final frame, and a frame composed in the TAB. Click images to enlarge.

"To control the timing of the animation we made some scene editing as well. We kept some elements still by repeating the drawing in the scene editor panel, and we inserted the sequence of animated drawings when we wanted its animation to start. If we needed to add some additional movements, rotation, or movements along motion paths, we took advantage of the Edit Column tool by defining keyframe positions and automatically moving drawings."

"In some scene elements were also shot with the multiplane effect. On one hand we were able in this way to reuse some material by repeating it at different distance from the camera, with different size and rotations. On the other hand we created a kind of vortex effect by moving the camera really through the turning drawings, in a sort of 3D environment. It was not that hard to achieve, but the result was very effective."

"At last we exported the TAB animation in QuickTime format and we passed them to the composer, that added some special effects and edited the final clip with Digital Fusion and Avid."

Tamás Ravasz, technical supervisor