Bonus: Potaro/Porter Robinson Commission

Dear Patrons,

This is usually the time of the month where I make a new update post and show you a preview from Tales of Zale. But I'm holding out for some news that should hopefully be arriving by the end of the week, so in the meanwhile I'd like to share some behind the scenes from this animation piece I was commissioned to do for Slush Entertainment.

I don't usually take on a lot of commissions since my hands are plenty full, but this was for a festival announcement for Porter Robinson, who's music I basically wrote my bachelor pitch around. I just love it when things come full-circle, so it was hard to say no. The whole thing was made over the course of 14 days, on top of my current job, and somehow it worked out. Of course there are things that I would have loved to spend more time on, but such is life. Anyhow, here are some insights:

First, it was very important that Potaro's model was 'on brand', so I provided a bunch of different options to nail him down:

Next, it was a matter of figuring out the general atmosphere and colour scheme, so I provided some springboards:

At first, option A was picked, but before I could finish the background, it was changed to B.

I do a lot of colour adjustments in the compositing phase. It was quite the beast to work with, because the layout was really large and bogged down my computer. I had to play it by ear sometimes, unable to see the results of my work until final render:

In order to make the whole thing feasible in the short time-span, I merged a bunch of different stages together. Character design also turned into final posing for the animatic, which in turn was animated directly on top of in the clean-up stage (skipping rough animation). I was able to do that because the motion range was relatively simple.

I hope you enjoyed this little insight! It was quite enjoyable to work on something with such a quick turnaround. Since the job is mostly puppet animation, and Tales of Zale is in the compositing stage, it's been a little while since I got to sink my teeth into some actual animation. And I really missed that!

Hopefully I'll be back with more news soon. Till then all the best,

- Sif