05 // Alternative Style Test - Inspired by Borderlands

Earlier on in my Animation project, before I began work on my own narrative and illustration workflow, I'd been quite interested in this clip of the Borderlands backstory cutscene:

I liked the style they'd used: by presenting line drawings with hatch-shading, they used a technique to animate the drawings appearing on the page while the camera was animated to swoop by and zoom in and out on different areas. While it wasn't something I could see myself using for my final work I wanted to at least try and mimic the style, to see if I could learn anything new from the experience. It's one thing to study from watching a clip and another to try and replicate the techniques: sometimes you can learn a lot more from a practical experiment.

Since my own artwork follows a similar linework-based approach, I was able to use some of my own work in the experiment. I'd been sketching out some character ideas earlier to try and jump-start the creative process and gain some ideas for my project. I used this sketch as my basis for this test. Cleaning up the sketch and adding an inked BG to give it some extra interest, I figured I was close enough to the Borderlands visual style for this purpose, so arranged the file into various layers ready for animating in After Effects.

I'm going to copy-paste from my Animation blog for this part, as I gave a pretty accurate description of my process for that, and I'm basically just repeating myself here:

"I had watched the Borderlands (1) animation a few times to refresh my memory before trying something myself. I noted that they weren't always using parallax, so I decided to try the same kind of shot as they used several times, which was a camera gently floating across a drawing as it gradually appeared upon the page.

The method in which the drawing appears looked as if they were using some kind of animated cloud effect (it reminded me of Filters > Clouds, in Photoshop) as a mask to gradually reveal the ink lines. I only knew the basics of masking in AE, so I watched a few tutorials to see if they referred to any advanced techniques. Which they didn't, so I just went ahead to try it out myself.

I quickly attempted a few things before finally getting some progress. I can't entirely remember the first few attempts and what I tried, but they were way off the mark so not really worth mentioning. At that point I was thinking of using the parallax effect, but I abandoned that idea and decided to keep the drawing (character and BG lines) on one layer, while a paper texture provided the backdrop,

The idea was to create a new solid layer which would have to behave like an animated mask, changing from black to white with a cloudy style, gradually revealing the drawing upon the paper. 

I made the solid layer black and kept it above the drawing. I scanned the AE effects folder to see if anything resembled the clouds filter from Photoshop. A quick bit of experimenting with several of them and I found Fractal Noise to be the best. It was highly manipulatable and every aspect of the cloud formation could be animated, which was exactly what I was looking for.

I knew what look I was going for - similar to the way film reel burns, swiftly and erratically in big spots spreading out and catching onto others - so I adjusted the brightness, contrast and evolution of the cloud to resemble what I had in mind. Once it was behaving as I hoped, I animated each of these elements to get a bit of variation to it.

The next part of my theory was to make this black and white effect act as a mask and reveal the layer beneath, keeping the paper backdrop intact throughout. I didn't really know exactly how to do this kind of thing in AE; in Photoshop it's fairly straightforward to apply a black and white image as a mask to a layer, but AE is a little more confusing.

I played around with a few different ideas before stumbling upon track matte. I watched a short tutorial on the fundamentals of it and tried it out on my own file. By changing the track matte property of the drawing layer to Luma Matte "Black Solid 1", the effect I was after worked perfectly.

I tweaked a few of the animation settings so that the effect would occur over the space of 15 seconds or so, producing a slower, more dramatic effect. Then I took each layer into 3D space and added a new camera that would be animated to float across the page and zoom in or out on the drawing as it appeared.

I made a few different passes and edited them together to get a mini showreel to showcase the effect."

"The effect worked as well as I could have hoped, so I'm pretty happy I managed to figure out the technique (despite not fully getting what I was doing, I can always go back and get better understanding of the process later). It might not look anywhere near as good as the Borderlands style, but I've picked up enough tricks from it that I might consider applying something similar to my own style later.

What I didn't like about the animation style is how the image becomes distorted as the camera floats by. Perspective plays a big part in the camera view and can have some drastic effects on the proportions of the drawing, making it look a bit weird in places, but I'm sure that could be adjusted in the camera settings.

I'll have to do a test at some point to see if parallax is as effective with this; I ran into some masking problems when I first tried it, which is why I went for the flat drawing look. I'll try that out again soon and see where it goes."

I still think that the style is something I won't use again for my own work, but there's no denying that I learnt something from the test. Plus it gave me a good bit of After Effects experience - I'm probably barely an intermediate user of that software, so any extra hands-on time I get with it is going to be good prep for my final work.