Skull Video Process pt.1 + Dead Cats

Hello! Wanted to share part of my process regarding the Skull and Shark teaser trailer. Check out the trailer here if you haven't seen it!

Basically for most of the video I tried to cut time and get results by using photos. Its pretty much just rotoscope but I'm not that great at it haha. I've got a more complicated video comin up that hopefully will utilize this technique a bit better though. I wanted to post about this because I know in illustration theres a lot of pride around hand drawing everything from nothin. But if the point is to just get across an idea and have a quick way to show what you're thinking I don't think its a problem to rotoscope.

So heres what I did. Basically just took a handful of photos(not the best technique, i do video now). But it worked for what I wanted, just simple movement. This isn't the only place in the video I used photo but I figured I'd post this example.

First I put on a basic example of Skull's jacket and did the head turn I wanted

After this I took a series of photos of the Skull I use for reference

At this point I just combined the frames and replaced my head with the skull. Which led to me doing linework over each frame and painting them.

Simple final animation -

Hope that helps anyone who is thinking of doing something like this! All of the work in the video was done using Photoshop CS6 and the Timeline tool.



And heres the bonus Dead Cats painting -