The Booksellers Ltd - Animated Short

The Booksellers Ltd. - Animated Short

This was a solo effort, except for the music which was licensed from Kevin MacLoed, and the script which was a collaboration between the client and me.

The colour script for the video.
Medium: Photoshop, Wacom Tablet.

I used natural lighting, showing the progression from an early morning in Ibadan to an evening sunset. The colour script, for the most part, suffers from an over-reliance on rim lighting to separate the characters from the backgrounds. I've learned a lot since I did this colour script in 2013, I would approach it differently today. The final backgrounds were painted in Photoshop.

A Rough Animation drawing from the short.
Medium: Graphite & Col-Erase Pencils on Paper

I started out wanting to animate the characters using the puppet tool in After Effects, but early tests didn't look as good as I wanted. I ended up using a combination of hand-drawn animation (pencil and paper), frame by frame Flash animation and cut-out animation techniques for the characters.

The lineless animation style proved challenging in the beginning, mostly because I was doing it wrong. I eventually figured out a less laborious way to handle it in Flash. The whole piece was cleaned up in Flash, although Photoshop was used to clean up some effects such as the speed lines that trail the boy when he zips in and out of the frame.

A frame from the final video.
CG vehicles and a partially CG animated background are used here.

For a good portion of the scenes involving moving vehicles, I used Blender 3d to create, animate and render the vehicles. There is also a scene with an animated background that was created using Blender. The integration of the vehicles with the backgrounds and characters could have been better. In hindsight, I should have given the vehicles the same flat treatment as the characters.

One of the fun things to do was explore gimmicks like Smear Frames and Multiples.

Rough Animation drawings - Smear Frames & Multiples
Medium: Graphite on Paper

Above: a rough animation smear frame drawing.
Below: The final frame.