We start by creating style frames for the end page with the show
information and A&E bug, and for the animated characters (Santa,
his reindeer and sleigh). The end page was designed and illustrated in
Photoshop by FlickerLab’s art director, Zartosht Soltani. The
characters were designed from scratch in Flash by Erin Kilkenny, who
used a 9 x 12 Wacom Intuos tablet.

Next, we set up the animation projects in Flash for 2D character
animation, and in After Effects for our composite. At FlickerLab, we
generally create our 2D character animation at 24 frames per second,
even though it will be shown on video at 30 fps. This is fairly
standard in broadcast 2D animation because it gives the animation a
more film-like feeling-just as live-action video shot at 24 fps appears
more like film-and because it requires six less frames of drawing per
second. (For more on that, jump to Step 9.) In this case, we
also built the After Effects project at the same frame rate, as the
only live action involved was the exterior shot of the Gotti mansion,
which we needed to slow down. We created the Flash project at a
resolution of 720 x 540, as it makes it much easier to draw characters
in a regular square pixel ratio, rather than the squished D1 ratio of
720 x 486 we’d be finishing in. We built the After Effects project at
720 x 486, and scaled the Flash files to that size when they were
imported.

To build your animation, create rough key frames of the action, about
one frame per second, to establish the flow. We exported a 720 x 540
jpeg of the live action from After Effects to use as reference in
Flash. We exported these key frames as a PNG (portable network
graphics) image sequence with alpha channel from Flash and imported it
into After Effects. PNGs provide a cleaner alpha than QuickTime video
out of Flash. With an image sequence, it is necessary to use Interpret
Footage inside After Effects to set the frame rate at 24 fps. Repeat
this for every stage of animation.

While the rough keys are being drawn, it’s a good time to set up the
After Effects composite. As the Gotti mansion was not shot for the
Christmas special in particular, we "decked the halls" with a bunch of
red ribbons and wreaths on the colonial columns, to achieve that "Very
Gotti Christmas Special" touch. The challenge here was that the mansion
was shot with a slow and shifting Steadicam move, with shifts in
perspective. Tracking on the decorations and animation was not
straightforward. The footage was pre-composed, as it would be
time-stretched. You want to do your motion tracking on the original
speed footage, track in your elements, and adjust the timing on this
final composite, and we used the After Effects motion tracker to get a
rough track. This was applied to a solid layer, which was used as a
parent for all the ribbons and wreaths, and later for the animation
itself. Because of the shifting perspective, however, we did a lot more
tweaking by hand, and added anchor and rotation key frames to better
match the move. The outermost ribbons were tracked to the footage
individually, as their distance from the center exaggerated the
imperfections in the track, compared to the shifts in perspective. The
Photoshop file of the end page design was also imported as a layered
composition so we could animate the type, add Santa, and "snow" the
shot.

The exterior mansion footage was shot on a summer evening, and felt
like it. It needed a Christmas Eve vibe. The black sky was keyed out
using the Linear Color Key plug-in. A new cloudy sky, with a moon for
Santa to fly past, was created using Tinderbox’s T-Sky Filter plug-in,
and a light sprinkling of flurries was added with snow pre-set from the
Tinderbox T-Sparks particle generator plug-in.

Once the client signed off on the rough key frames, our handy
non-Thanksgiving committed Canadian, Phil Lockerby, began building key
frames for all the main action. Erin Kilkenny and two other animators
took these over to start drawing in-betweens and clean up the drawings.
One of the huge advantages inside Flash, which animators sometimes fail
to take advantage of properly, is symbols. For Santa, we created a
symbol for all his head angles, another for his mouth positions, his
eyes, and his eyebrows, and put these together in a group. This way,
rather than redrawing all these elements, we could draw them once, and
then set the symbol to the appropriate frame number. Any new drawings
needed were just added to the symbol. One set of animations was also
created for the sleigh and for the reindeer. Because the rest of the
Santa animation involved more individual and non-repeated body actions,
it was drawn frame by frame. I recommend doing it this way if you’re on
a really tight deadline and want to achieve a more fully animated,
smooth motion, while maximizing re-use of your drawings. Export and
pull your line animation into After Effects for client approval.

When you colorize your animation, you can use symbols to save tons of
time. Each sleigh position was only painted once, for the whole piece.
If you need to change a symbol as you go (for instance, the sleigh
runners look too curved in context), you can apply the revision only to
the small number of drawings in the symbol.

Bring back final animations into After Effects. As a "parent," we used
the same solid layer that we applied motion-tracking information to, so
that it was matched back to the live footage (there’s a fair amount of
extra tweaking that happens at this stage). Next, you need to
convincingly "marry" the animation to the footage. A slight blur (Fast
Blur.75) was applied to soften the sharp edges in Flash, as well as a
slight blue tint to match the nighttime lighting. We used the Red Giant
Software Composite Wizard Light Wrap plug-in to give the animation a
moonlit feeling, as well as add a hand-shaded look, as we didn’t have
any extra time to make much of a lighting pass in Flash.

One week and several animator-sleep-deprived nights later, we were
ready to render the files and post them for A&E producer Degan
Snyder’s edit session. If you build your animations in 24 fps, like we
did, you’ll need to add a 3:2 pulldown to make it the 30 fps necessary
for broadcast delivery. The 3:2 pulldown blends frames using fields to
get smooth playback at 30 fps; it’s also used when films are
transferred to video. Our final render settings in After Effects: Best
Quality, Full Resolution, Lower Field First and WWSSW for 3:2
pulldown-the same as the A Frame in the Avid, which we were rendering
for. The output settings were set to QuickTime using the Avid Meridien
compressed codec at a 2:1 compression. This way, the editor just needed
to download it and pull his final, ready-to-air video into his Avid
edit session.

After fixing a few things, making some revisions, and posting a couple more times, of course.

Harold Moss, Creative Director, Flickerlab

Harold Moss is founder/creative director of five-year-old FlickerLab,
New York, a multimedia design and animation company for film,
commercials, broadcast design and television content. FlickerLab’s work
airs on the A&E Network, Bravo, Lifetime, among others. Notably,
Moss was animation director for the three-minute cartoon, A
Brief History of the USA, featured in Michael Moore’s Academy
Award-winning, Bowling for Columbine (2002).
FlickerLab was also the graphic design company for Moore’s Cannes Film
Festival Palme d’Or winner, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Project:
A:30 promo created for the A&E show, Growing Up Gotti: A
Very Gotti Christmas Special (original air date: 12/13/04)

Software: Macromedia Flash MX; Adobe Photoshop CS, After Effects 6.5,
and Illustrator; Apple Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro; Tinderbox
T-Sparks and Red Giant Software Composite Wizard Light Warp plug-ins

Hardware: Apple Power Mac G5 Dual Processor; Wacom Intuos 3 Graphics
Tablets; Apple Cinema Display 23-inch monitors; Aurora Igniter
uncompressed video card; Sony NTSC Broadcast monitors, DigiBeta decks
and BetaSP deck; Leader Broadcast color scopes; LaCie FireWire drives;
Konica Minolta Color Laser Printer Magicolor 2350; Epson photo printers

Source Material:
30 fps DigiBeta video, shot with Steadicam, plus 720 x 540 Flash files and 720 x 486 AE files created from scratch

Output:
720 x 486 D1 video for an Avid Meridien

Director: Harold Moss
Executive Producer: Tammy Walters
Associate Producer: Franklin Zitter
Art Director: Zartosht Soltani
Character Design: Erin Kilkenny
Lead Animator: Phil Lockerby
Animators: Erin Kilkenny, Simon Ampel, Phil Lockerby

FlickerLab
www.flickerlab.com
315 W. 39th, 4th floor
New York, NY 10018
ph: 212.560.9228
info@flickerlab.com