Henrique Barone Animates Mike Edel’s “The Closer”: Making-of
Last September, Skwigly interviewed Henrique Barone following his short film “The Man Who Saw A Boat”. Barone’s work is a blend of 3D and traditional 2D texture, and he has been published within a ‘Art of Short Films’ compilation book.
Barone has just released a video for Mike Edel’s song “The Closer” – about baseball and his references/memories about baseball. Once you have viewed the video, take a look at the ‘making-of’ materials below (courtesy of Henrique Barone).
Character Design
As far as Character Design, I think that’s one of the projects I’m most proud of; and a big part of it is thanks to Mike’s feedback. He had a clear idea and good descriptions of how he imagined the characters. His comments like “I feel that this video should have more of an adult feel, not like Saturday morning cartoons that are super jumpy, bouncy and happy” helped a lot to bring the character design to a more adult look, which is different from other things I’ve done before. By my Goofy reference above you can see he was probably right.
We had the idea to go very minimal and clear with the style, so I chose to go for simple shapes that would match this concept (and would also be easy to work with). The two things I liked since the first sketches were the cap’s shapes and how graphic the uniform could look with the straight lines. The part I struggle more with, was to find the appropriate head shape and its facial features. They should look less cartoony, yet with an unique and appealing design to it, not just ‘realistic’ as a real human head. With that in mind the sketches below were made:
When the character’s shapes and the facial features started to go somewhere, it was time to start playing with colors and styles. At the beginning we had had this idea of playing a lot with negative spaces, making some parts of the characters disappear against some parts of the background. Other than that, Fe Ribeiro gave a huge hand helping with a fresh approach for the colors and final looks, developing the different styles below.
And finally, the change that actually made the design hit the spot, putting the characters in a more adult and serious mood, was to draw them with actual human proportions [or very close to it]. And so the character were done and a realization was made: man, I draw HUGE heads! 🙂
Animation
With the characters done it was time to jump on the animation. My first thought (aiming to match the amazing quality of the song) was to go all traditional, doing it all frame-by-frame, but with the schedule we had ahead of us, it soon felt a bit crazy. The solution was then to bring as much as possible of this look and feel to a more production friendly approach, which involved having the characters broke up into pieces [symbols] and use them based on a traditionally draw rough guide. Some of the very last details such as the little lines in the arms and legs conections were then draw frame by frame to help to enhance to traditional look. Best case scenario, most of the scenes would definitely look frame-by-frame, especially the action scenes with the Pitcher, Closer and Batter. It was a very good opportunity to find that sweet spot between art and production that makes a project flow nicely.
But the scenes that I was mostly worried about were the acting shots. The lyrics has some very deep and touching moments and, of course, the animation needed to match those. Personally, it’s always easier to do a cool jump/run/kick thing than to convey that a character is thinking and feeling something. Those are the moments were subtle eyes movements, blinks, small briefing moments and pauses come to play a huge role. At the end, I’m very happy about how the Mom/Pitcher scenes turned out and also the whole Coach’s dramatic arc.
Go to henriquebarone.com/the-closer to view some animation tests.
Finished Frames
Mike Edel: Music / Production – www.mikeedel.com
Jorge Canedo: Production / Art Direction – www.jrcanest.co
Cesar ‘El Diablo’ Martinez: Art Direction / Layout / Storyboard – www.behance.net/eldiablo
Arm Sattavorn: Storyboard / Compositing – www.armmotion.com
Henrique Barone: Character Design / 2D Animation Direction / 2D Animation – www.henriquebarone.com
Breno Licursi: 2D Animation www.instagram.com/