I animated the fat lady sings shot yesterday. I decided I could live with 13 drawings and a held cell while she held the note. At first I held the drawings for 4 frames each to span the length of the animation. When I saw the animation with the sound, it felt off, so I shortened the duration of each drawing on 2s. I am contemplating even putting the drawings on 1s to give it even more punch. I’ll try that today and see which version works beast.
I also considered having her face turn red, but 2 seconds go by very fast so I abandoned that idea. The body held cell is actually included with the painting of the background and that image was depth mapped. Her COVID breastplates are given extra prominence in the depth map.
When I animated the camera move in Volumax Pro. her arm holding the axe ended up moving a bit screen right. That is a happy accident I kept in the shot. Another camera move is used inn Premiere pro to zoom out from her face. That move tends to make the parallax effect less.
Painting these cells are a challenge. In a feature animated film the colors are very flat. I am however trying to blend the animation so it feels like the painting that I originally did. That is a challenge since the it is almost impossible to keep the values painted on each cell consistent. The paint tends to jitter and crawl a bit, and I just need to fiddle with the painting of each cell to tone down the earthquake.
It helps to paint on thing at a time, like the shadow down the side of the nose on each cell with the same brush and brush size. It is always a guessing game. Since the shots are so fast, I am thinking maybe I could paint one cell and copy that painting onto each other cell and morph them slightly. Then again I kind of like seeing the human touch. I am figuring this out as I go.