Tag: Mammoth

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.

Mammoth Task

Animated GIF: the final animation will be an HD mp4

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

Mammoth

mammoth

This mammoth looks exactly like my original frame from the Short History of Rhubarb comic strip from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, except that it isn’t cropped (the tips of the tusks and the mammoth’s rear end are missing in comic) and, despite the flat colours, I’ve now reformatted it in eight separate layers, so that I can animate individual features like the trunk and the eyes.

Mammoth’s Trunk

My next step in Adobe Character Animator has been to rig my drawing of the mammoth’s trunk by adding a fixed point and a movable point, joined by a series of nine ‘sticks’ which act like a string of beads, so that the movement of the trunk isn’t too shapeless and elasticated.

The background is added to the scene in just the same way as you’d add an additional character, although so far I’m not intending to add any movement to it. I can always come back and add a ripple effect to the river or have the rhubarb leaves swaying in the breeze, but so far I’m concentrating on the essential action needed to tell my story.

After Effects

I’ve added a couple of finishing touches in another Adobe program, After Effects, with a title and a snow effect. I probably won’t go for snow in the final version, but I couldn’t resist trying it out.