As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, one of the core ideas of Echoes, my animated science fiction short film, was “teaching” my computer to draw the way I do. Having done lots of frame to frame animations as well as rotoscoping before, I knew that creating an animated 15 minute short film completely by hand was not an option – even if it was rotoscoped.

I needed to create a workflow that allowed me to create more animation frames within a shorter period of time than I had done in the past.

By the way – what does rotoscoping mean?
Traditional rotoscoping is the art of drawing over filmed footage to create the illusion of movement. You take your actors, ask them to do what you would like your animated characters to do and film everything from the angles you need. Then you print out the frames and draw your animation characters over the filmed footage. “Fire and Ice“, the movie by Ralph Bakshi, was filmed that way.

Below is a clip of the animations I did for the band Dark Signz. The characters were animated the way I mentioned before.

The Dark Signz animation style was heavily influenced by th 80ies music video “Take on me” by A-ha which is one of my number one childhood memories.

For Echoes, I wanted to create another look. I wanted Susan, the character, to look much cleaner.
So I did some sketches of Iris Graf, the actress, to see what the character could look like.

I liked the look, but it didn´t look cartoon-like enough. So, very quickly, I ended up with this look, which will be the way Susan will be rendered in my animation short film.