The Making Of

The study of a spectacular kick. Click image to enlarge.

"I worked starting from material found on books, videos and the web. I imported all I could in the TAB, to have a reference. I only had to deal with the animation of the main character, no matter background elements and other characters."

"First of all I sketched the basic movements in one level, to check if the animation could work. Then I cleaned it up with the Brush tool used as a pen (that is to say no variable thickness to the lines), often using different levels (head, chest, arms and legs) to spare drawings and time."

The animated sketch and the final animation.

"The final work is the result of the combination of traditional methods and the exploiting of the new digital technologies the TAB offers. Basically I worked on the frames in this way. When they were one similar to the other, for example a slight movement of the leg, I used the inbetweening feature, that works efficiently and quickly, while to change particular frames in a more complex way, I duplicated the drawing and modified it manually with the Pinch tool.
To quicken the animation process I often moved some parts of the character, for example his head in the running scene, only with keyframes."

"The coloring part of the work was the easiest one, as we decided to use flat colors. The production told us to export each animation in two ways, with the red uniform and with the blue one. That was very easy for me, as the only thing I had to do was to change a color in the palette and all the frames were automatically updated."

"At last I exported the TAB animation as a sequence of TGA images, I passed them to the Art Director and composer, that added the texts, the music, the effects and the background elements with EditBox and edited the final clips."

Patrizia Lapo, animator.