Big Finds a Trumpet
2017
A love letter to the 80s TV of my childhood.
*N.B. - I'm please to announce the full film is now available online!
password (if required): bfat
People can be really annoying, even when you really like them.
My goal was to make a bit of an homage my own childhood influences - 50s design and 80s British kids TV - as a way of experimenting with combining traditional and digital animation techniques. It was to be a film about opposites - big and small, noisy and quiet, digital and analogue, bouncy and smooth - old and new; but most importantly, I wanted to have fun making it.
Early character and design concept development
Development
Developed from pencil-and-ink sketches, the design was heavily influenced by the 1950s, but brought up to date with flat digital colours. The film was animated using Photoshop's timeline and animation tools, and supplementary animation was done in After Effects.
The hand-made elements - paint strokes, background elements, textures - were then composited onto the backgrounds to give some texture and contrast.
Early "Big" walk cycle
Early character walk cycle and background design
Animation development; line, colour and hat, background work
The "noise" of the trumpet was originally created by scratching patterns and shapes directly onto 35mm film, which was then run through a projector and photographed frame by frame.
I Photoshop I then drew some digital patterns and loops with more of a contemporary feel, before combining the two to produce the effect used in the film.
Development of the trumpet "noise". L-R: pen and ink, 35mm scratch film, digital pattern, composite pattern
Finally, a lot of effort went into "ageing" the film, spending a lot of time in After Effects offsetting the RGB channels, adding grain and warping the image very slightly to give the impression of it having been produced on film or on VHS tape, as that's how I watched most of my childhood cartoons.
Cheers!
