Step 3, Two-Frame Animation For Emirates Airlines Commercial

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Photo of a monk
This is the photo reference supplied to me by Brand New School. They hired a model, found a costume, and shot reference for the two drawings. I assembled all of the reference photos together in Photoshop, putting each photo on a separate layer. The photos included were: portrait without glass, portrait with glass, and a landscape.

Time-lapse video showing phase-3 of the rendering process.

Shooting Reference Photos
After determining at what size and with what detail the portraits should be rendered, we needed to roundup reference material for the likeness of the monk, Dom Pérignon. The only visual reference we could find for Pérignon was in the form of a statue located outside the cellars of Moët & Chandon in Epernay, Champagne, France. This statue, however, was carved after Pérignon's death in 1715, so it is obviously the sculptor's best guess of what Pérignon looked like. We reasoned, therefore, that no one has specific knowledge of what he looked like and that any male model with monk-like features and characteristics could be used to pose for the reference photos.

I normally take care of finding a model, renting costumes, and shooting my own reference photos, but in this case Brand New School, being a film and TV production studio, had far better resources for this than I did. They took on the job of shooting the reference photos. I gladly removed the cost for shooting reference photos from my estimate, and Brand New School provided me with excellent photo reference. (The only request I had for the photos was to have a strong, single-source lighting coming from above and from the left. I did not want flat lighting.)

Shown at the top/left is the reference provided to me by Brand New School. They shot two portraits for the monk–one portrait for each frame of the animation (the landscape is an assemblage of stock photos). The reference photos for the monk were dead on. The only change I made while doing the final rendering was to make his hair around the sides slightly fuller. The reference also showed a landscape background, which I had not been aware of when giving my estimate, so I was allowed to readjust my estimate accordingly.

I received the reference photos from Brand New School as separate files. Since it was important that the drawings line up exactly for the animation, I used Photoshop to assemble all the pieces together on separate layers, position them, resize the portraits to the size they would be drawn, and print out each layer separately.

These prints were used to do pencil tracings that were transferred to a piece of scratchboard (sometimes called scraperboard) for rendering. The prints also served as a visual guide while doing the final rendering.

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