Hello everyone and welcome to a Winter
Sock Productions tutorial! My name is
Arginnon and today i'm taking you behind
the scenes of my LEGO sponsored Disney
project, Stormboat Willie. First I'm going
to share some of my creative process
with you, but this tutorial is ultimately
about how I made this, from this. Before
starting off however, I have to say a huge
thank you to Brick a Brack and its
wonderful staff for giving me an
opportunity to work on this project.
I had a fantastic time working on my
segment and I got to try a number of
techniques that I have never done before.
As soon as I started working on the
video I knew I wanted to do it in a
cartoony style. I wanted it to be as
close to the original cartoon as possible.
Well... not that close.
I knew, however, that I needed to make the
sets, the animation and sound more
stylized than my usual to achieve an
overall cartoony feel. When brainstorming
with the lady Arginnon we came up with
the idea to use hand-drawn backgrounds,
so I studied the backdrops of the
original Steamboat Willie cartoon, I added
some extra LEGO details and voila,
hand-drawn backgrounds for a cartoony
effect. As you can see, I used orange
paper, which is a bit odd, but since the
video had to be black and white, the only
thing that mattered, was that the sky
looked gray in the finished product, and
not clear white. If you decide to use
this idea and add hand drawn elements to
your brickfilms,
be sure to avoid pencil. I learned this
the hard way when the light I used to
illuminate my sets, bounced off of the
graphite, giving the backdrop a very
amateur, glossy feel. So if you want to do
something like this, stick to markers
fineliners or brush pens.
Another thing that cartoons tend to do
is to highlight action.
This was another idea that came rather
soon: I knew I wanted to incorporate
these action lines in the film. They're
pretty easy to make, you only need an
illustrator program. I recommend Krita,
it's free and very effective almost as
good as Photoshop. And of course you need patience.
I also used lines like this to
illustrate the wind but these were
animated in flash because it would have
been rather time-consuming to paint
these frame by frame as well.
Sometimes I also added smear effects to fast paced
action to make it more dynamic and
cartoony. I added this neat lightning in
post-production as well, trying to blend
it in with the hand-drawn background.
Blending it in with the background
wasn't the only important thing however.
I learned that every effect you do has
to blend in with the film itself. This is
why I try to always ground my digital
enhancements with onset practical
effects. For the Lightning for example I
also shined a hard white light at the
set for a couple of frames while filming
so that the lightning itself would feel
real. This was also the case with the
rain. I knew that I was going to use
digital rain (courtesy of footagecrate
dot com, go check them out they've got great free stuff) but I wanted to make it feel
more real. So inspired by Yosepi98's
video, I sprayed actual water on the set
from handy bottle every other frame,
thus grounding my digital effect with
a practical one. Since stop-motion
animation requires a lot of electrical
equipment such as lamps, at least one
computer and a camera, be very careful
when using real water, and don't let any
of it get near your equipment. This third
effect I wanted to mention no longer
serves the purpose of creating a
cartoony feel but the exact opposite. I
added a bit of blinking and mouth
animation to the figures to make the
film more realistic and to make the
animation, well, less boring and
minimalistic. This might seem like
something that's not worth the time to
invest in, because it's not some
spectacular visual effect, but this small
addition to your film can really kick it
up a notch. Your characters will feel
less like lifeless LEGO figures and more
like actual characters. I hope you
enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look,
and maybe found something that you can
use in your own films. Stay tuned for
more tutorials like this and more brickfilms like Stormboat Willie.
Thanks for watching
and see you soon!
