Roy’s Odyssey: Comic-book character
It’s wednesday (things have been going so quickly recently!), so that means it’s time for another episode of Roy’s Odyssey VFX prep thoughts….
I’m going to leave the opening sequence alone for now, as I’d like to have more of a chat with the production team before figuring out exactly what we’re going to have to do there…
Anyway, the comic-book character…. As I mentioned a while back, there is one sequence where one of the main character’s comic-book characters comes alive and talks to him from the page.
Most of the decisions here will be down to the director - it is going to make a big difference whether he decides that he wants it to be a proper comic-book (inked and coloured) that comes to life or a sketch that the main character doodles….
If it’s inked and coloured, my current plan is to go with a 3D character that is then rendered using a carefully worked out 2D toon shader. How we’re going to get this looking good, I don’t know yet - I’m going to have a chat with some rendering people and see if we can work something out.
If they want it to be more of a doodle that comes to life, then we’ll probably go with hand-animated, or rotoscoped video (see the “Take On Me” music video (by AHa) for the best example of this - and, in my opinion, one of the best music videos around…). Anyway, the direction we’re going to take on this one mainly depends on what kind of style the director wants from the animation.
Either way we go with the character himself, we’ll shoot the paper clean, with ‘guidance lines’ on (these may actually be practically usable as the frames of the comic… we’ll see what they want…)
I suspect these shots are all going to be locked off - I’m going to be carrying around a load of LED and tape tracking markers just in case they decide on the day that they want a moving shot.