Spatula Madness Production Blog

I haven’t made many posts recently about the actual process of making Spatula Madness, so I thought I’d give you a quick view of how I animate the characters in this movie.

I am using a program called Adobe After Effects to do all of the animation work in the film. It’s a powerful video composition program not usually used for animation, however because of the ease in which it handles many layers of images it’s the perfect tool for making a movie in the sort of “cut-out” style Spatula Madness is done in.

Here is what the interface looks like:

http://www.spatulamadness.com/blog/images/anim1.jpg

To the left I have my files and documents for a scene, up top are my controls. To the right is some scene information and additional tools, and on the bottom is my “timeline” where most of the work takes place.

Here is a document with Crazy Homeless Guy added:

http://www.spatulamadness.com/blog/images/anim2.jpg

As you can see he is now on both the scene viewer window and the timeline window.

If I Command+Double Click him, it opens up his document I am able to animate each of his individual parts:

http://www.spatulamadness.com/blog/images/anim3.jpg

If you look at the timeline you can see many, many different new items. Each character is composed of a variety of different images, and each image can be moved by itself. In addition, certain images are “linked” to each other and move when the other items move. For instance, his right hand will move when I move his right forearm (so that when I move his forearm his hand isn’t left behind hanging in the air.)

I animate the characters in this movie as if I were animating a stop-motion figure. Meaning, every frame I move his various parts slightly more, and over time you get motion. The most important thing After Effects does that really speeds this process up is called “hold keyframes.” When I move a part of him, After Effects automatically sets that as a “keyframe” in the timeline - and this is where hold keyframes come in - it’ll only count that as a move for one frame and won’t effect anything that came before it (as opposed to “tween” keyframes, where if you set two keyframes 10 frames apart it’ll fill in the movement between those 10 frames.)

You can see two of those hold keyframes here:

http://www.spatulamadness.com/blog/images/anim4.jpg

Here’s a better explanation of the difference between hold and tween. If I have his arm by his side on frame 1, and then set a “tween” keyframe on frame 10 with his arm in the air, the computer will automatically fill in frames 2-9 with animation of his arm moving from his side to the air. If frame 10 was a hold keyframe instead of a tween, it wouldn’t do that. Frames 1-9 would be his arm by his side, and then frame 10 would have his arm instantly jump to the air. I then go back and manually animate frames 2-9 myself instead of having the computer do it automatically. Why? Because when the computer does it, well, it looks like a computer did it. It’s too “smooth” and doesn’t have that sort of organic “stop motion” feel. It takes a lot more time, but it makes the animation look less like some idiot on a computer did it and more like it was done professionally.

Well that’s all for now!