Silent night
For Christmas 2013, Flipside decided to create a short animated piece to celebrate the season, plus it was a chance to do some character development and work with animation partners Fifthstorey.
We love music here at Flipside, and it always evokes a feeling of Christmas whether it’s classic, or pop. Music as a starting point seemed fitting for us too since we’ve enjoyed some fantastic projects within the music industry in the past.
We picked 'Silent Night' and thought the visual pun of ‘silent’ would be a quirky route to develop, so the idea of a silent movie was born. Vintage, still very much on trend, and Victoriana, which has a associated romanticism when it comes to Christmas, were selected as a theme. We also took influence from work of artists such as Steam Punk, Terry Gilliam and Heath Robinson.
We sketched out some storyboards and created characters having done some research into Victorian clothing, vehicles and visual language of the time.
Storyboards, characters and research
Character Development
After Flipside and Fifthstorey were happy with the storyboard and characters, Sam from Fifthstorey worked his magic.
To make Adam's wonderful illustrations into working puppets was actually fairly straightforward. First the various limbs and body parts were separated into layers in illustrator and these were then imported into a program called Toon Boom Animate. It works very much like Adobe Flash but has an arguably more animator friendly interface and toolset.
One of the neat features in the latest pro edition is bone warping. This allows you to create an overlay skeleton of joints which are then bound to the drawings underneath. The deformations are really natural and allow for convincing arm and leg movement without having to cut the limb and pivot it around the a knee or elbow joint which can be a bit mechanical, especially if the drawing has not been designed for this kind of separation.
Once animated, the characters and background were composited in after effects with some z depth to get some nice parallax motion. Red Giant Particular provided the snow while the cine film effect was mostly provided by a plugin from Video Copilot called 'Twitch'.
My favourite element was the postman. It's always oddly satisfying to do a nice cycle then sit back and watch it loop its thing! And when you throw in a penny farthing you can't go wrong!
Thanks to Sam at Fifthstorey, we look forward to working together soon.
For character development, animations, presentation work, storyboarding please get in touch with flipsidestudio.co.uk for your next motion or animation project.
