Monday, February 06, 2012

Two Penguins: 24 hours of production

If you have't seen TWO PENGUINS already then please take a look and then I will answer most of the questions that I have been getting about it right here and now.




So how was this 24 hours of work? SPOILER AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT.

Not quite in a row, but here is how it broke down.

HOURS 1 - 10

Since I had the basic story Idea i could get Laura started in Photoshop putting the elements together for the background while I finished the storyboards. My storyboards were extremely crude drawings but they were enough to get the point across.

Once I had finished the storyboards I moved on to doing the key frames for the animation. The plan was that Laura was going to finish the background and then move on to painting the frames. This is basically what happened, we were moving along at a good pace.

All the drawing and digital inking was completed in Adobe Flash.

I finished all of the key-framing for the entire piece then moved on to finishing the final altered bloody background.

At some point we used my Zoom H6N to Record Laura saying the titular "I'll miss you. " line.


At this point, Laura is super tired and she goes to sleep. I stay up and finish the rest of the inking and then follow in her footsteps.

HOURS 11 - 17

I assembled all the pieces in Apple motion. Since Motion accepts Photoshop layers with transparency and reads alpha channels from QuickTime files, I was able to easily drop thing in, size them up and get a good working idea of what shot looks like.

It took some time to create the aurora borealis effect in the sky, but once it was finished, it was an easy copy and paste to each shot.

HOURS 18 - 20

Once all the shots were exported, putting them together in Final Cut was pretty simple. I got some extra sounds from freesound.org (great resource by the way0 and then recorded the random penguin sounds which I generated with my mouth,

HOURS 20-24

I am not the greatest musician or the recording of the song in TWO PENGUINS would have gone a lot faster. What are you gonna do huh? I harmonized the best I knew how. Please berate me for my efforts.