The Making of ‘Otter Pop’ Short Music Video

Hi guys! I owe you the process of our rotoscope animation, so i’ll fire away. Me and Rico definitely had a blast with this one, I hope you learn something from our process!

The art of Rotoscope was developed to add a sense of realistic movement to animation from the more subtle mouth movement to complex, broad action. Certain actions, such as dance offer an array of moves that read well when rotoscoped. I this video, we interpret the song Otter Pop by Shawn Wasabi by using the technique to attempt to give nuisance to the track through narrative and visuals.

Mixing the Paint: More on Story and Style

The song and the visuals play with the simplified narrative to convey the message of the video. Otter Pop’s vibe, through the artist’s point-of-view, communicates the Infectious desire to be bold, original, unhinged, and unadulterated. Watercolor is a medium that is used to relinquish control, letting the water run and pigments bleed. Although eventually settling on digital pipeline, this plays well with the theme of letting go. As is with Rotoscope, the animator relinquishes precise control over the entirety of the movement. Color was used to symbolize the vibe, with warm colors such as red and yellow to represent the ‘vibe’ as opposed to cool variations of blue and green which symbolizes the stagnancy of routine disposition.

Letting the Paint Run: Execution

We tried watercolor style to relate to the tone of the music. Early on, we tried to use traditional means of rendering, bit switched to digital when it proved impractical. Upon switching, we made sure to replicate the style by working with custom brushes in photoshop timeline.

See below for a complete rundown of our process.

1. Choosing a style
2. Choosing the Song
3. Later Shoot with Sound (asked 3 people to dance for us)
4. Initial Cutting and Editting (Premiere)
5. Exporting the reference video
6. Rotoscope Process (Photoshop)
7. Adding watercolor and texture (Photoshop)
8. Cutting the Rotoscope Animation back into the Video (Premiere)
9. Final Edit

A segment from our video where the colors aka the ‘vibe’ is transfered to another person before coloring process and after:

One Last Cheese: This is How We Otter Pop

So how does one ‘Otter Pop?’ Let go, give in, and take head long plunge into the melody, feeling the colors run wild while your body leads the way.

A list of Pixar’s Technical Achievements

WARNING: BORING SCIENCE STUFF AHEAD.

I think I grew up admiring Pixar more than Disney (Gasp! Blasphemy!) and with good reason.

The stories were just more captivating, especially within the period of time that Pixar continued churning out hits at the box office.  Wether it be toys, ants or robots, Pixar films always had a certain charm backed up by good quality stories. During the 90’s Disney had a major downturn with their 2D animation that culminated with them ultimately switching to CGI. We can say that 3D CGI caused the death of 2D, but Disney just wasn’t as good at the time as Pixar was, both in story and in visual development.

There’s a reason why Pixar Animation was the key to putting animation back on the map. Simply put, without Pixar’s development of CG Animation, Disney would have been in trouble. John Lasetter, Chief creative officer of Pixar has a quote that embody’s the spirit of the entire operation:

“Art challenges technology, technology inspires the art.”

This phrase describes the relationship that exists between art and technology and has resulted in them pushing past all the limitations of computer-generated imaging. Up to this day they are continually advancing the entire field that they created through their once simple vision to use computers as a medium for storytelling.

Pixar’s Online Library houses all of the dissertations they’ve done talking about these very advancements. For those technically minded people, go to this site.

I found this thread in stack Exchange with complete links to each pdf from the library. below are all of the noteable ones, as transcribed from the best answer on the thread:

General:

• Rendering tooling – RenderMan
• Lighting – Ray differentials and Complex illumination
• Fluid – Efficient simulation of large bodies of fluid
• Soft body animation – Key Point Subspace Acceleration and Soft Caching
• Deformable bodies – Volume conserving FEM on deformable models

Movie techniques:

• Chess game (short movie) – Subdivision Surfaces in Character Animation
• Monster Inc – Untangling Cloth
• The incredibles – Simulation and Rendering of Hair
• Cars – Lighting engine, Acceleration for Animated Global Illumination, Interactive depth of fieldand Ray tracing
• Ratatouille – Crowd animation, articulating appeal, Acting with contact in animation, Food animation, Surface from particles rendering, Simplification of Aggregate Detail, Soft reflections, simulating white water rapids, Hair/fur rendering, cloth simulation and Harmonic coordinates
• Monsters University – Better global lighting and Physics based lighting
• Brave – Curly hair and Large scale geometric visibility
• Multiple movies (Toy Story 3, UP!, Pirates of the Caribean) Point based global illumination

List without papers, but notable used techniques:

• Toy story: First big feature animation movie, new re-rendering techniques
• Toy story 2: Acting and behavior of animations
• A bugs life: Fluid animation
• Monster’s Inc: Fur
• Finding Nemo: Underwater rendering, sea surface
• Ratatouille: Cutting food and wet fur

For further reading, see this article by the Animation World Network that discusses why Pixar is good, technically, and otherwise.

Akira Kurosawa and Movement

Adrian here with a little observation!

Some of the earlier material we covered ties animation very closely with Film. Some early filmmakers like Georges Méliès for example capitalizes on camera tricks which later on became staples in animation. Much in the same way, we continue to learn from filmmakers, and see correlations between live-action and animated film of all kinds.

I’m about to point out an observation of mine that informs my ability to craft great visuals for the animation I make. I would be sharing information about one of the greatest directors in Japanese film: Akira Kurosawa. In this video essay by Tony Zhou, he talks about the ‘movement’ aspect of Kurosawa’s films.

 

Our trip through Japanese animation reminded me of this sense of movement and directionality in Kurosawa’s Films. There’s a few ways in which he does this, according to Tony Zhou, and one way is through “movement in nature.” In the murder mystery Rashomon (1950), Kurosawa’s opening scene happens with the rain raging in the background. Kurosawa utilizes some element in his background, doing so consistently.  Noburô Ôfuji, similarly, does this in Kujira (1952). This compelling story happens in the midst of the crashing waves and a raging storm. Much like Kurosawa, the elements can be used to reflect the mood of the scene as well as, according to Zhou, add to the “visual interest” of the scene.

Animation has to have the movement choreographed and made. This makes it not as likely to have it in every shot.This constant movement may not always work well in animation, due to it leading to bad staging, but adding it to certain scenes could spice up the composition of the animation we make and lead to some interesting cinematic storytelling. Select scenes from Kumo to Tulip (1943) appear to employ this, but this time as a plot devise, rather, adding drama to the situation.

I recommend you watch the rest of the video essay for more information. Kurosawa has other methods to infuse his scenes with motion which involve other aspects that even involve mass crowd action. Film, does inform animation and animation can inspire interesting shots in live-action film

Final Project Update

Hi guys! Adrian and Rico here once again. We got inspired by the Paper fold animation we isaw in class not too long ago and decided to do some origami art! On the image above, you can see the different prototypes we had before we made or final one and our final one. We tried different folds until we got a good one, then used a sheet of thinner paper on the final one for easier folding.

Here’s a closer shot of our final model

We hope your projects are doing well!