One Hundred Bears // Selecting the artwork

Now I had the format decided, I needed to identify which of the pages would make interesting animations. In doing, this I found that a lot of Magali Bardos' illustrations are repeated in similar form around the page, this is great for me as I can use photoshop to cover and uncover parts (for example the buttons on a bear's shirt) or combine multiple illustrations into one animation GIF or stop frame style (for example the counting hands). Here were some ideas for scenes from the book that had movement or action that could be translated into animated form:

Next, I took all of the scenes that I had identified with potential and manipulated them in photoshop to get a rough idea of how effective they would be. Here I was able to move all of the bear's buttons to separate layers. This technique would allow me to turn them on and off in After Effects and emphasise the counting more visually.

By cropping each of the hands and lining them up on top of each other, I could make a convincing count up and down. 

I did a quick test of this is AfterEffects and found that this actually worked really well. With these pieces in place, I needed to pick which to go ahead with and create a storyboard to establish sequence and pacing. 

I knew that I wanted the book to count upwards, which would mean using spreads and not just single pages or the numbers wouldn't match up. I will frame the scene to focus on one side of the page at a time. This ensures that the composition is never too cluttered, and the viewer knows exactly what to be looking at. 

In Photoshop, I created the cover and spine of the book. I calculated that 720p, this would format would let me scale each page to 400x481px. This was a simple graphic that I could manipulate in 3D space, using a simple darker strip where the spine would be and a subtle gradient at the top to emulate a curve:

In 3D:

storyboard

Having looked through the pages of the book, I have identified the following scenes to animate in sequence:

5 fingers counting + 6 bears in the forest 

10 butterflies + clock chimes 11 at night 

20 cakes + 21 rungs of the ladder

Fevers of 39 + 40 drops of medicine

69 sleeps + 70 days

This gives a nice summary of the book's contents without giving too much away. This should also fit well within the 30 second limit outlined in the brief. 

Getting the pages to match up as they turned proved to be a lot more of a challenge than I thought it would. The only method I could find that didn't cause the pages to break through each other was to end one composition as it hit 90 degrees straight and start the other at that exact moment. This change-over is unnoticable if the camera is exactly head-on. 

mismatching page crossover

Quick test with spine and animation:

I thought that it was important for this brief that I create my own soundtrack. This turned out really well in Specs and gave me much more control over the tone and timing of the animation. The animation style I have planned to use needs to pop from one frame to another in an almost stop-frame effect. This would be much easier with music to time it to. In Ableton Live, I created a simple synth-led arrangement that sounded like it was counting up. I can use this as a guide to animate to in After Effects counting out the beats as visual markers in the timeline.