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MillimeterDigital Paint Job
Aug 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
Director J.J. Sedelmaier found the under-appreciated art of digital ink-and-painting invaluable when directing a recent :30 promoting Clorox Clean-Up spray cleaner. "Side by Side Houses" portrays two 2D-animated houses scrubbed by different cleansers and "acting" differently.
Sedelmaier based his 2D drawings on illustrator Bonnie Timmons' "loose, gentle, washed, watercolor" style. "I wouldn't consider painting these images conventionally by hand on cels," says Sedelmaier. "You can't do watercolor on cels, so we would have had to do it on paper, cut holes in the various pieces, and overlay them all together. That would be way too time-consuming for a commercial, so we brought the job to Virtual Magic."
Even with the digital process, North Hollywood-based Virtual Magic had to do an extra step to capture the watercolor texture: Artists colored the drawings more than once, creating different "levels" of color, and composited them together. The subtle textures of the final images replicate Timmons' hand-drawn watercolor images.
Virtual Magic TD Lajos Kamoscay performed the digital paint work using Softimage Toonz ink-and-paint software, rather than the company's main tool, USAnimation software. "Toonz is a bitmap-based program, while USAnimation is vector-based," Kamoscay explains. "For this job, since the image had to be really textured, we couldn't use vector drawings, which are black and white. That's OK for regular solid fills. But we needed to fill gray-scale areas with texture, so we had to go with a bitmap tool. This way, we could create individual layers of color, separate them from the line animation, and adjust the transparency and opacity."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
