One Hundred Bears // Intro and details

With the separate compositions in place, I had to produce an intro to the video which would show the cover of the book. As I wanted to begin the animation with an open book, I couldn't show the cover as closed so instead I had to use the artwork as a full-screen graphic. I made a intro using the elements of the flying eye logo, but decided against using this in the animation as its didn't really fit the tone of the rest of the work I had done.

Instead, I decided to reference the publisher as a page at the end of the book and focus on representing the title at the front. Looking at the cover illustration, there was little I could do to animate it without having the separate design files. Instead I wanted to give a friendly and subtle introduction by rotating the top bear's arm slightly to make him wave in time to the music:

A

B

I made this intro just long enough to make a change in the music line up to the clock striking 11. This creates a much better paced composition. 

While the animation was structurally in place at this stage, the book just wasn't convincing enough. I needed to work on building a level of detail that would make the pages seem more like paper and the folds less wooden in their animation. I used a number of techniques to do this:

Page Noise:

I created a noise texture in photoshop to make the pages look more like the printed page and remove the clean digital look that takes away from the aesthetic slightly. I could apply this to every page and lower the opacity to make the effect as subtle as possible. 

Here was the noise texture used. 

before

after

Shadow:

The pages currently looked too flat, when a real page would bend towards the spine. To simulate this, I made a simple gradient at the edge of the page. As the page went to turn, I moved this gradient in the composition further in which better supports the illusion that the bend in the page is turning and makes the animation look much more realistic. When timed with the 3D rotation this effect worked surprising well. 

In context:

CC Bender:

Finally, I didn't like how the turning page looed like a board and had no movement it in. This was a challenge to imitate in 3D, but I found an effect called CC Bender that warped the edges of the pages as if they had been bent. By applying this to the right amount at the right times, I was bale to subtly warp the pages in 2D to create an effect that mimicked the movement of a page in 3D. 

Before

After

Coloured Backgrounds:

As the original illutrations used such strong and striking colours, I went through the animation and made the background colour switch periodically to become a prominent colour from the composition. By cycling through these, it should help to promote the vibrancy of the book. This effect was particularly good at enhancing the clock tower scene, where the music and colour change are timed to just as the clock strikes and gives the action more emphasis in the composition. 

Combined, these effects made the animation more realistic and gave some style to the simple page turn which should all help to bring the characters to life.