Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood™
Adding Life to the Backgrounds
Part of the post-production of Apollo 10-1/2 involved adding in extras and background movement to the many scenes in the movie. The gorgeous backgrounds were provided by the incredibly talented artists over at Submarine studios in the Netherlands.
With the use of TvPaint animation software, my Minnow Mountain colleagues and I composited, tracked, scaled, looped and colored in all of these extras giving atmosphere and life to the beaches and theme parks in the film. Some of the characters are actually fellow animators from the studio! (I’m in a few!)
Tests & Outtakes
To achieve the effects in this film a fair amount of testing and experimentation had to be carried out under tight time constraints. What you see below is the result of this (…and way too much coffee) .
Testing people as particles to quickly populate scenes. Here I took multiple colorized variations of the same character and set him up as a particle to be emitted in the scene. The motion and spacing is all there, but there were issues with overlap. In a scene with this many characters, clean-up of any overlap would have been an arduous process.
Another test on the concept above, with the crowd originating from a single point outward.
This was a test to see the limits of TvPaint’s camera and 3d stage. I wanted to see what kind of camera movements, depth, and parallax I could achieve. (I was listening Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova” on this particular day)
Another experiment to test out TvPaint’s particle system to bombard these poor children with a swarm of mosquitos.
A test for infinite looping background/floor and setting up timing for character footfall.