Artist’s Notes
Captain Underpants
Animating the face and tracking it on to live action or stop motion puppets was as much a dream come true as It was a technical challenge. Sometimes there was nothing more than a blurry magic marker “X” for a track point and sometimes there was nothing at all so I had to eyeball it. I used Adobe’s Camera Raw to color correct all of my shots because it was handy, required no extra software license and based on experience, is easy to use.
Some shots had live action puppets on a green screen that required color correction before they could be keyed. Then we created realistic popsicle stick characters in AE to be animated and comped into the foreground.
Other times we would simply create the entire scene in AE to animate and composite with artwork from the CAP team.
Principle Krupp’s daydream called for these characters to be animated in 3D. I actually animated the face separately from the body in After Effects because we had already developed a sophisticated face rig there, then we composited it onto Krupp using a UV render pass.
Trolls
All of the felt scenes for this show were created with AE and Photoshop based on production artwork.
Kung Fu Panda
I created a flower petal in Maya, rotated it on loop, then used that footage as a sprite in Particular to fill the environment. I also used particular to create the sprite trail effect and composited the environment art as 3D cards in AE.
I used the AE puppet pin tool to animate this dragon artwork.
Wallykazam!
Wallykazam! was a Nick Jr. show that called for a lot of effects. I decided the fluid effects would need to be handled with a combination of old-school hand drawn and AE Particular effects to avoid the appearance of a fixed aesthetic.