ONIGIRI ANIMATION
(a TEST)
this is a hybrid-technique animation test.
1: rotoscoping
it all starts with footage of yours truly eating onigiri in a messy hotel room in Nara, Japan - which I'll shamelessly share with you. no need for fancy cameras or manners.
this is actual footage of me eating for 40-odd seconds. feel free to disregard.
not the most elegant of eaters.
as a first step, the video is painstakingly traced once every two frames, even-numbered frames being a duplicate of the odd ones. I used a software called Clip Studio Paint for this.
tip: having no hair helps cutting the production time by 80%
if this already looks to you as some kind of shortcut to avoid animating, as it might, you're as mistaken as I was when I first tried it.
next step is to add two customizable colors for shadows and highlights. I went for gray and white, but for clarity I'll switch to random cold/warm colors.
2: fake 3D
for the background, I imported in After Effects a bunch of 2D elements drawn on Photoshop. was it fun to rotate these 2D sprites and stick them together to make a 3D room? no, it was the usual pain in the neck.
it doesn't matter how long I keep doing this kind of thing. the enjoyment always seems to dwell in the early stages and towards the end; the middle ground is all madness, self abuse and dread of failure. but I digress. here's a fun animation of the room building itself.all that was left to do was add a light source for the background, animate the camera and grin at the result.
I never got around to actually adding the onigiri. this calls for a KickStarter campaign.
many thanks!
