With these two animations, I’ve completed my Brief History of Rhubarb for the Rhubarb Festival.
To finish the sequence, I’ve drawn the rhubarb sculpture which stands at the corner of Thornes Park.
Month: February 2020
Drawing Rhuben
Just in case you were wondering how I conjured up my cartoon character, head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, here’s the inside story, as seen in a timelapse video of the whole process of drawing in Adobe Fresco, from importing some of my sketchbook drawings to create the scene in the Rhubarb Patch, to isolating elements of Rhuben, such as his left forearm, for my animation.
The video lasts one minute. If only I could work at that speed!
In the next section of my video, I’ll draw portraits of Prophet Wroe and Adam Hood, forester, who will then introduce their own corners of the Rhubarb Triangle.
Camel Train
At last I’ve got those camels actually walking across the Gobi Desert. This is another Adobe Animate scene for my rhubarb animation, drawn in Adobe Fresco on my iPad Pro.
Marco Polo on Rhubarb
Marco has found his voice in my latest clip for my Brief History of Rhubarb animation.
Marco Waves
Before I add Marco Polo himself to this scene of a lush growth of rhubarb in the mountains of Tangut, China, I wanted to perfect the waving hand, which in Adobe Animate is a Movie Clip symbol. Having animated the waving hand symbol, the movement is added to the cartoon as a Motion Tween.
Marco’s arm won’t be moving across the screen but my next Motion Tween challenge is two of Ghengis Khan’s camels laden with rhubarb, so I wanted to start with something simple.
Chinese Rhubarb Medicine, 700 BC
Racing ahead with my rough cut of the animation: I’ve reached 700 BC already, only another two years of rhubarb history to go!
Rhubarb Titles
Here’s the rough cut version of the titles of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation. There’s lots of little improvements I could make to this but I need to see the whole two or three minute film first before I get into those final touches.
Like so many wildlife photographers, I’ve gone for a bit of slow motion in my opening shot of a mammoth discovering that rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and other chemicals as a defence against grazing animals. The slow motion wasn’t deliberate, but I’m still getting used to the timeline in Adobe Animate.
The Rhubarb Patch
Having sorted out such knotty issues as the mammoth’s trunk, I’m now turning my attention to the titles for my Rhubarb Festival animation. This suitably homespun title introduces the section where we meet the head gardener, Rhuben, leans over his garden gate to talk rhubarb.
Mammoth Task
As a change from Character Animator, I went to another Adobe program, Animate, for the mammoth sequence. There’s a tool that adds a mesh to my drawing, so that I can deform the shape from frame to frame. Also very useful is that if I bend the trunk on frame 25 of a sequence it will add a smooth transition. When I worked on Watership Down we had key animators, who drew the start and finish of the movement of a character and other animators who filled in the gaps, a process known as tweening.
Once I’d mastered the techniques of tweening and warping the mesh, I then had difficulty bringing the whole thing together. My final lesson was that everything: the mammoth’s trunk, its right ear, its left ear and even the tusks, which don’t move at all, needed