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Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 1, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The idea for the film was born somewhere between our band rehearsals and the Pixar anniversary exhibition in Bonn, where a zoetrope with the characters from “Toy Story” was presented. In the search for possible music video motifs for a song that sounded like southern rock, it was perhaps the cowboy Woody on horseback with his Stetson hat that got the whole thing rolling. In the next project, there was to be a rotating hat on which cyclically animated figures do funny things on several levels … and tell a story in the process.
“… and why 3D?”
However, a real zoetrope has one disadvantage. The storyline is naturally limited to the duration of one rotation, which is not conducive to a longer-lasting narrative. We wanted the animations on the individual floors to change several times during the course of the story. At the brim of the hat, the shore of the rotating island so to speak, new conquerors should always appear, triggering a change or exchange of the cyclical plot from level to level. This made it clear that such a change of animations could not be achieved with a real filmed zoetrope in rotation mode, but only with 3D animation.
Our protagonists were to have a 2D cartoon character and be placed on a carousel in 3D space like paper figures. The initial work on the film was a mix of classic hand drawings and digital paintings on a graphics tablet, before being drawn in Photoshop and animated with Adobe Animate. The PNG stacks exported from this were then post-processed twice in After Effects and output both as an outline for the stand-ups and as a corresponding image texture for Cinema 4D. There, the circular arrangement of the figure poses, which had been transformed into stands, was placed on a rotating hat model in the shape of a step that morphs into a cake, where they were swapped scene by scene and filmed using tracking shots. Finally, After Effects and Premiere were used for post-production.
We worked on one or two 27″ iMacs with 24 Gbyte memory and a GTX 780M graphics card. When it was getting close to the festival deadline for rendering, a Mac mini was added.
Story, 2D, 3D … finished
The story would be set on a rotating hat, which would gradually be colonised like an island. There should be themed floors such as “Arrival / Shore”, “Hunting”, “Labour”, “Fire”, “Living” and “Ruling”. At the very top lives a cow that gives the whole island its milk – sometimes freely available, sometimes privatised – which in the end makes the whole island sink into cream to form a cake.
After months of work, a “script” was finally created in the form of a large pinboard with a coordinate system of notepads, seven in height and 17 in width, which, like bullet points, reflected the plot of the actions taking place on seven floors, which were later to be changed 17 times.
Storyboard – No, thanks!
Of course, we needed an overview of the storyline for such an animated film with 17 x 7 animation cycles, but a classic board with its editing instructions made no sense, as we only wanted to decide later from scene to scene how we would pan the camera over the respective events on the zoetrope. Instead, we created 17 portrait-format sketches on which the seven floors and their animations were drawn on top of each other and each summarised in a scene. The camera would later, with a few exceptions, move through the floors from bottom to top (or vice versa), each as a scene, with the figure stands being flipped from the old to the new animation as the camera panned across.
Everything in 2D for now!
Based on this outlined script, the key poses of the actions were first sketched out by hand and drawn in on the graphics tablet. We imported and vectorised the PSDs in Adobe Animate, where most of them were broken down into several components and animated. As only recurring animation cycles were possible due to the rotation of the zoetrope, we decided on 12 drawings per animation, as this number could also be divided into, for example, (3x)4 drawings to represent the flickering of fire or (2x)6 drawings for the swivelling of a milk bottle or the bouncing up and down in a bathtub. The animations would always run “on two”, i.e. at 12 fps.
Preparation for Cinema 4D
The drawn animations were later to be arranged like paper motifs in a circle on the floors of the “hat platform”. For this purpose, the PNG stacks output by Animate were imported into After Effects and first packed into a square format to standardise the reference sizes and then further processed twice: For later use in Cinema 4D, a stack with slightly modified image textures in colour was created on the one hand and a stack with black and white alpha templates with a little extra margin as an outline for the later creation of the cardboard stands, which were to have a small white border around the drawn motif, on the other.
Using Vectorizer and Extrude, the alpha templates were then turned into three-dimensional stands in C4D, onto which the respective image motif was textured. A radial cloner with 12 objects was created in order to place these cardboard mates in a circle, to which the 12 stands were subordinated for better control. As a luxury addition, a small controller was made to control the rotation and radius of the objects and the cloner. Each of these animation rings was then saved as an individual scene so that it could later be inserted into the large master scene as an Xref. This allowed changes to be made in this small scene.
The mother of all scenes
To tell the story of the conquest of the rotating island, cameras were to move or pan from one floor to another scene by scene, changing the animations by flipping the motifs. To achieve this, all 120 or so animation rings with their 12 poses were imported into a large master scene, sorted in the layer manager, colour-coded according to scene number and floor and organised for successive fading in and out in the viewport.
The approximately 1,400 (12 x 7 x 17) texture images with the individual drawings were also organised in layers in the material manager to prevent it from exploding.
As the animations do not necessarily run on the spot, depending on the floor, but should move to the left and right around the zoetrope, 4 to 5 differently rotating cylinders were connected to a superordinate floor zero object via constraints. Once their height and size had been fine-tuned, these cylinders also served as a template for the hat model, which would morph from a cowboy hat to a cake pedestal using point animation, and were later faded out.
Tracking shots as storytellers
After these elaborate preparations, it was time to get started. The story was told scene by scene using tracking shots, pans and fades. In weeks of work, the animated objects were flown over with cameras alternating between long shots and close-ups, coordinated with the groove of the planned film music, and at the right moment
or exchanged and saved as a film scene. It really took a lot of brainpower, especially when two rotating planes were interacting with each other, such as the fighting tournament knights.
For the final look of the rendered images, we placed less emphasis on physically over-correct shadows and more on creating some dirt in the niches through ambient occlusion, and the aspect of depth of field was important to us in order to get the bustle of the various animations visually under control.
“A zoetrope just flickers!”
Post-production was done in After Effects and Premiere. When watching a real zoetrope, the strobe light required for the flip-book effect always causes flickering, which we wanted to simulate, especially when the carousel starts and brakes. To achieve this, the files rendered from C4D at 12 fps were processed in After Effects at 24 fps and every second frame was darkened by animating the lighting. A vignette mask was also created to provide additional focus on the centre of the image. The film was finally edited in Premiere, where only a slight colour correction was carried out.
The complexity of the final story, the master scene overflowing with objects, textures and layers and the not entirely trivial timing of the cameras to the planned groovy soundtrack pushed us to our limits here and there. But all in all, the project was realised as planned and without any problems worth mentioning, possibly also thanks to the good planning and lean team size.
Back to Reality
In the end, there was still energy left to bring a scene from the film back from virtual space to reality. More than 80 motifs were printed on photographic paper, mounted on MDF, laser-cut using the outline vectors obtained from the alpha templates and glued onto a staircase-shaped carousel. The carousel is set in a steady rotation by a temperature-controlled motor and illuminated by a strobe light made of LED panels. The piece premiered at the Cologne Open Studios at the end of September 2018 and has been on display at the Strandhaus Ahr cultural centre in Voerde near Dinslaken since December. It will then go on tour. The current location will be announced in good time on our homepage.
Last but not least, an illustrated book with the story of the film told from the perspective of Butch the bear has been created as a by-product, which currently only exists in a limited number of unique copies and is still waiting for a publisher ..
