A lot of work goes into an animated scene even before it is fully animated. Tony Cliff, a Vancouver artist, recently uploaded this animatic for the opening of Rainbow Rocks that he worked on. If you're an animation buff and love to see this stuff check it on out after the break along with a description of the process from Tony!
Thanks to Masem for the heads up!
Tony:
The rough animatic, as delivered to DHX Media, for the opening credits sequence of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks. All material is copyright HASBRO STUDIOS LLC.
In December 2013, I was given the opportunity to produce a storyboard for the opening sequence of RAINBOW ROCKS. I love a good title sequence, I love animating to music, and I was excited by the style they were describing to me, so this was a real damn treat to work on.
The visual style was described in a handful of still images produced by the Art Director, Ridd Sorensen. He established the concepts of the silhouette characters, the solid colour themes, rainbow motif, ben-day dot effects, and the typographic choices.
The characters were meant to have very limited animation that would end in a held pose. The first half of the sequence aims to use a series of tableaux to recap the major story points from the first EQUESTRIA GIRLS feature. The second half would be an abstract, '80s-style roller-rink rock and roll bonanza.
Since it would be so tightly timed to the audio, I figured it would make the most sense to just complete the board directly in Flash, the animation tool with which I am most familiar (and which I believe affords the most easy flexibility). It would also allow me to describe the motion and animated elements to a fully-featured degree that I hoped would take some of the guesswork out of interpreting the board. That would make it easier for the directors to provide criticism and for the final animators and effects artists to move forward quickly and confidently.
The bulk of the work was completed over three days, with the entire process taking somewhere between seven and ten working days. I cleaned up some key poses, building usable Flash assets for them, but I've hidden all of them since it was distracting to have them pop on. (I did, however, include the "villains" as an example). All work was completed entirely within Adobe Flash, for better or worse.
Twitter: Calpain
