Dinosaur frames and scene

I have been considering hard on the amount of random/ surreal additions to add to the background or into certain scenes. Things that will add detail and life to an already bare bones animatic.

I decided to look back Winsor Mccay and got inspiration to add a slight reference to one of his other creations. Gertie the dinosaur. This was looked up on page 63-64 of the book: The World history of animation. Gertie the dinosaur was a combination of film and vaudeville acting in the 1910s, and it was what cemented him as a historical artist of animation.

I wanted to know more by looking up on the internet for the animation of Gertie the dinosaur and realised its intention, an actor presented the film onscreen like a window to another world in which he would talk and command the dinosaur to perform for the audience. It’s very surprising how metatextual it is in terms of a performance but still allows its audience to be sucked in by how the actor and the animated character interact.

Either way, I thought it would be a cute little nod/ influence if I put a very similarly designed dinosaur into the animation itself. Preferably in the Cinema 4D background for the forest scene.

What I did was draw the body first and tracing animations for the head movements on the lightbox, the head and neck would move but the body would remain stationary.

I then scanned all the frames and body and coloured in adobe illustrator. The transparent images are then lined up with the body in after effects to which I controlled the lengths of each frame and created the animation.

As for putting him into the scene, I found a good space. Even though he isn’t big he still at least fits into the scene.

I then animated the composition to move at the same pace of the composition underneath which made him move with the scenery whilst making him look stationary.

And for the final illusion and duplicated the composition of him, stretched it out, used the threshold tool to darken it and used a gaussian blur to make a shadow. This is what officially made him look as if he was in the scene. I am very happy with how it turned out, it was mostly experimental but it turned out great.