Interview with the Art Director

How many people was involved in the production? How did you organize your work?
There were three of us, with a vast amount of work and a very tight deadline. We had to work on 70 animation clips in a week. One member of the team made the caricature and attended to the simplest animations and the character’s face expressions, another one created the most complex animations and I dealt with the composition of the scenes with a post production software.

Which software did you use to do the whole animation?
We used Adobe Illustrator to design the character, the TAB to create the most complex movements and Quantel Editbox for the final post production.

Why did you choose the TAB?
We had a previous experience with TAB and we recalled how quick and effective it was in production: with such a tight deadline TAB was a no-brainer choice. As we knew the time we had at our disposal to be very short, we contacted again the freelance animator hired for the previous experience and hired her again.
Luckily we had the opportunity to use the beta version of the TAB and we soon realized the new version was, by all the means (but especially from a professional use standpoint), a big leap forward.

Sketch drawings and animation study of the football player animations. Click images to enlarge.

Which TAB feature was particularly useful in the production process?
We made the most of all the TAB features, but most of all we used the Pinch tool, to adjust the lines freely and without the anchor points, that is to say very quickly! Then we exploited the possibility to import video clips and do rotoscoping. That was really useful to study the movements of the football player and to speed up the production schedule.

What do you like most in the TAB?
We really enjoyed all the line modifier tools.

What do you think the TAB lacks?
The girl who did the caricature worked in Adobe Illustrator and she had to export her drawings in .swf to import them in the TAB. We would have preferred a direct support to .ai format but the workaround (export from Illustrator in SWF) was adding really no overhead to the pipeline. Finally, we are only waiting for the end of May, when the 2.2 version will be released. We know it will run on Mac OS X.. That’s really great for us!

A global comment on the TAB?
Well, first of all I found the new version really revolutionary compared with the 2.0 one. As I already told you before, the old one had everything in order to be a good starting point, it was a good promise, really excellent for everything concerning the drawing and modifier tools. But the new one is really great. Preserves all the good things introduced in 2.0 but also represents now a mature product with no lacks. It offers now the possibility to use the software for a larger range of purposes, including the broadcasting videos, that is my field of use.