Animated Paintings
Death and the Miser
Flemish painter Frans Franken II produced the original painting around 1635. Each character had such a dynamic pose, it seemed to naturally move! I brought it to that level with a combo of Photoshop and After Effects trickery.
The Garden of Death
These ‘reanimated’ skeletons were born from Finnish painter Hugo Simberg in 1896. The colors and relative serene nature of the figures felt at home with all the seasonal autumn lo-fi playlists I listened to while animating it. Naturally, it had to be paired with some.
Music: Flowers by a[way]. You can follow them on their SoundCloud page.
Scroll more to see how this effect is made!
The Process
First and most importantly, I had to find the best quality scan of the painting. The better the quality, the better the snipping! Something that’s apparently frowned upon to do to real paintings.
This was the original reference I used for the animation. Found from the Ateneum Art Museum.
From this file, I cut, isolated, and filled in missing spaces to produce the scrapbook-like layers that would become my skeleton rigs.
I knew I’d want a subtle 3D effect, so I went ahead and created as many complete background objects as I could.
Tie your shoes before you run
Bringing it all into After Effects, I set up my 3D Stage. Precomps will be important for this, so every major animated layer has its own. I want a slight shaky cam effect, so I stagger all the layers and scale them up proportionally.
An easy way to check, is to bring back the original painting as a difference layer to see where mismatches are and adjust. That way, I always know where my “zero” is for the animation. Pure black means a perfect match!
At this point, I tested my shaky camera effect to make sure it had the right appearance before I animated anything else.
Square rigging
DUIK Bassel is a killer plugin for After Effects that makes rigging really straightforward. (Site plug)
Using the tool, I created my -ahem- skeleton for the animation. I used the original frame as my reference for limb lengths. A few custom bones were made for the cloth using puppet tools to make sure there was some movement overtop the bones.
Getting keyed in
Animating the skeletons came with their own sets of challenges to overcome, and beyond the scope of this section. What was important was that I wanted to convey a characterization of the main skeleton having a bit of a limp, and as such was very deliberate with its free hand. Once the main movements were down, the beginning and end of each skeleton layer had to be keyed so that it looped with itself.
The rest is a breeze
Nature being the theme, I decided to add a gentle gusty loop to the flowers.
Using a noise based displacement map, I could get precise control for how the wind affected the flowers in their pots. Not only that, but it would be a unified wind for every flower layer, so they bobbed together with the pockets of wind.
To loop this, I doubled up the displacement map layers. Then I brought the end of the layer to the beginning and extended it. This became the transition from the out to the in of the noise layer.
Pass the bass
For the finishing touches, I found an appropriate song that fit the lo-fi look of the painting. The song had the perfect length section that required minimal splicing, so the loop was very simple to fade and return to its beginning.
In addition, I added some wind and bird atmosphere with lower frequencies cut off to evoke an older speaker feel.
And with those last edits, the piece was done!
