sfjohnston wrote: ↑05 Aug 2017, 17:46
It's nice to see the results you have, and thank-you for crediting the "test image". (It's a drawing by the one-and-only Eric Goldberg.)
I'm happy to answer questions if I can!
Scott Johnston
Hi, Scott -
Thanks for dropping in to the conversation.
Your name is very familiar to me and I can see from your IMDB listing we worked on some of the same productions , but I don't know if we ever really knew each other back then. I hate to admit that those days are starting to seem kind of far away and hazy to me , hard to remember , except for the people I worked with directly in the animation and clean-up departments. I was at Disney when were in the warehouse buildings in Glendale (Airway/Flower St./Rodier Dr.) until 1995 , then briefly was at the Hat building , before transferring to the FL studio to work on Mulan.
The Lumo document you authored was very interesting to me. Thanks for ID'ing the drawing by Eric Goldberg . (when I first read through the document I guess I didn't see the part at the end where it was mentioned that the drawing was by Eric , although now that you mention it I can definitely see that now ... I used that image in my earlier post because Lumo was the topic from the original poster and it was mentioned :
"You could probably do something like this in TVPaint if you manipulated the FX Stack right." so I made an attempt to show how something similar was indeed possible in TVPaint , using that image for comparison. Then Elodie added all of her additional information on how similar lighting effects could be done in TVPaint.
sfjohnston wrote: ↑05 Aug 2017, 17:46
I'm happy to answer questions if I can!
I'm curious: did you develop Lumo specifically for "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" or was it something you were developing anyway on your own ? Was it used in other films or commercials to duplicate that "Roger Rabbit-like" look ?
I had worked on the original Roger Rabbit (doing character clean-up) and near the end I helped out a little bit with EFX , doing inbetweens on the tones and highlights . Later I worked for Dale Baer at his studio where we animated a lot of commercials that had the "Roger Rabbit-look" (that was a hot and trendy thing for a few years) and it was a similar approach to drawing the tones and highlights (we were still in the
cel era at that point , although Disney had switched over to CAPS by then ... when I was at Baer's we animated a portion of "The Prince & The Pauper" , which was the last Disney production done on cels, because as you know CAPS was so slammed trying to get "Rescuers Down Under" finished, there was no time to add P & P to the schedule . Later on , back at Disney (the FL studio) , I had the pleasure of working on the Roger Rabbit 2 test that Eric was directing. Most of that test footage was hand-drawn animation , but one scene was done in CG , in an attempt to see if the look of the squashy-stretchy hand-drawn animation could be duplicated. (for people who don't remember: this was at a time when distorting a CG character too much was usually something that was just not done because the conventional wisdom was that it would "break the rig", but Eric really pushed this idea of "breaking" the rig
intentionally , to get looser, more exaggerated CG animation . It's normal nowadays to have CG characters that can move in a broad, cartoony way, but at the time (1999) that was not the norm.)
Speaking of Eric, I have a set of notes by Eric that were photocopied and passed around at Disney (and other studios) , which later turned into his book "Character Animation Crash Course" . The xeroxed notes include some material that wasn't in the book , including several pages of notes on combining animation with live-action and how to draw the tones to give the characters a "sculpted" look that makes them fit into the lighting scheme of the live-action footage. I'm posting one page from the notes that might be of interest to anyone reading this topic . I touched this up a bit in TVPaint before I uploaded it ... the xerox copy had dropped out in certain areas, and I darkened the shadow indications in blue so they would show up more clearly. Hopefully , Eric won't mind that I posted this page from his notes. (*Eric, if you happen to read this and you want me to take the image down, let me know and I will remove it , but I thought this was historically interesting and germane to the original topic under discussion here , of how these things were handled in "ye olden days" vs. how we'd do it today .)
When we were doing stuff like this on paper and cels for Roger Rabbit and for the dozens of commercials I worked on , the shadow tones were one element, but we also had additional layers for highlights and intermediate tones , so the final image might have turned out something like this image:
.
)
