That 70's hand drawn animated film look

[CyberFilth]

So this is my first attempt at animating something substantial in Moho.

I last used Anime Studio years ago, but recently got inspired to pick it up again and try and animate a short film in a style that I haven't tried before. This is my first attempt at the intro, I'm aiming for a 70's hand drawn look. Kinda like Heavy Traffic... ish. I've not done much with rigging the character, just drawn several keyframes and pushed points around from one keyframe to line up with the next. It kinda works, and looks just janky enough that I'm happy with it.

[slowtiger]

The guy's animation is already quite good. I know how hard it is to maintain volume and rigidity in a naturalistic style!

I'm not really comfortable with the 3 different background styles. The room around the guy is nice, it is a bit too empty, but that's a good statement with the flat colours. Maybe just a little bit of textures at the corners? This one is easy to maintain. The cityscapes seem off to me, too much contrast, too happy? And the photograph in the end just doesn't fit - IMHO.

There's an account on Twitter https://twitter.com/GrimArtGroup which posts 20th century artwork about workers' life and living places. You may find some inspiration there.

Please keep us updated!

[CyberFilth]

Thanks for the link, I'll see if I can get some inspiration there.

I found the backgrounds more of a problem that the character animation, to be honest.
At one point I cut up some newspapers and made a collage, then I scanned it and painted over it in Gimp to make a background. But I wasn't happy with how that looked. Maybe for some scenes it'd work, but not for camera pans over a background.

[slowtiger]

There's so many possibilities for a good background style, but apart from my personal taste I found that one pont is crucial: consistency. Whatever you choose, you need to stick to it.

Examples for photo collage BGs can be found in Yellow Submarine and Korty's Twice upon a time, and in numerous shorts of course. (And I throw in my own festival trailer https://vimeo.com/51438218.)

It seems easier to start from b/w images. Maybe do a colour script first: decide which main colours to use in which segment, and thick to this. Usually subdued colours and a restricted palette work best. A nifty trick is to grab colours from a photograph. Another decision: BGs with shadows or without? That's a bit dictated by the story, but can be used to great effect: hard shadows for everything dramatic, a grey subdued sky for hopelesnes. For interiours I prefer flat colours and some textured shadings in the corners.

I like to storyboard BGs as well as action. Tiny pencil thumbnails so I can see how much darkness and light I'll have, and where the horizon's going to be:



Hope this gives you some inspiration!

[CyberFilth]

I think that I've settled on the same sketchy style of background art that I used for the bedroom.
I'll post a work in progress here, since I can see this taking a while before it's finished.

[slowtiger]

That's a nice one!
In the real 70's they'd done this with flat colours only, but that gives it a cheap TV look, methinks. I'd prefer (totally personal again) seeing brush strokes and textures in the fills. Luckily I have the exact right software for that (TVPaint), I could even throw in some scanned or photographed parts.
(Aside: in the 80's I sifted through 25 years of magazines (fashion, news, anything) and collected boxes full of color pages from that, with the intention to use this in a collage film. When I moved cities in the 90's I threw them away - stupid me. That would be such great fill fodder nowadays! Oh well.)