I was so excited when I got the DVDs of The Man Who Planted Trees from inter library loan. Despite having a pressing assignment deadline, I just have to watch it.

It is so so so incredibly beautiful - Frederick Back's work is just so beautiful that I was so mesmerized, and so inspired. The story - is also so beautiful only Frederick Back could have been able to produce the animation for it....

I really love hand drawn animation ... it has such charm and beauty that i find kind of missing in 3D...
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So here's my first cutout, all ready to animate.



And this afternoon, I've finally gotten a taste of cutout animation (putting it under the Oxberry camera).
No mean feat, but loads of fun.

Strange for one having relied so much on a computer, but now, a refreshing change of using scissors, pencil, paper and loads of imagination. I love it!

Hmmm....
Starting from frame 130
Frames 130-177 for Title (24 frames) and first shot (24 frames) - EWS that shows the tree, girl on swing (Anna?), butterfly.
Fr...
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stand animation....
.. to do...

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I really love to do the animation. And playing with interesting camera angles is fun!

"I'll add one where we shoot from underneath the spinning magical papers!" so I said to Simon excitedly, "a low angle shot." That became shot 34b - and with 37, 38, 39, I was done with key poses. 4 shots in one day on October 16 - the Friday of week 12!

So here, I've Anna looking bewildered by the spinning paper - one of my favorite shots.


Anna and Jaws looking at Spinning Papers


Jaws Jumps up excitedly towards...
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This simple technique is useful for animation. In fact, I redid the smoothing part of Anna, by changing from subdiv proxy to mesh smooth. When animating a character it is good to have the choice of displaying either the high-res or low-res model.

Following [2] what I did was to create a smooth custom attribute on the Anna's master node, with min 0, max 3, and default 0. Then I did a Mesh->Smooth on Anna's character, dress and hair. Using connection editor, I connected the smooth attribute to ...
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Character Set is very useful for animation.

I was looking at [1] and following it religiously to create anna character set (selecting master node).
However when referenced in the environment, Anna's various manipulators (pelvisManip, pelvisOverrideManip, handManip, clavicleManip) stop working after a key is set on the anna character set. Spent the whole afternoon stuck on this amidst time that is running out. After analyzing and trying various things, and on the verge of giving up, I looked at...
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