Elbow Open Arms Archives - Trunk | Animation Production Company
Elbow | Open Arms
On 06, Apr 2011 | One Comment | In news / blog | By Layla
Phew! we’ve just finished making this video for Elbow for their new single”Open Arms”. It’s based on the illustrations of Elbow’s album cover designer Oliver East. The video is based on a loose narrative of Oliver’s depicting an evening in a Manchester Working Man’s Club. Directors Grigoris Leontiades and Layla Atkinson worked closely with Oliver to stay as close to his original vision of the story as possible. We drafted in a team of animators to animate in Oliver’s inimitable style. A particular challenge was animating the distinctive “ribbon people” which Ollie had designed in his original storyboard. Early on we realised the enormity of animating these in 2d so we turned to Trunk’s old friend and ace compositor Steven Azancot who brought flat 2 dimensional ribbons into cinema4d, animated them moving around a 3d space on splines then outputted as 2d elements to be composited with the rest of the dancers. We strove to match Oliver’s illustrative style as closely as we could, we animated on 8fps, added hand painted boiling textures and chromatic aberration to give it as much of a hand-made feeling as possible. It was a long, drawn-out and sometimes painful process with some disgustingly late nights but now it’s over and we can breathe a sigh of relief.
directors- Layla Atkinson, Grigoris Leontaides
designer- Oliver East
producer- Richard Barnett
commissioner- Emily Tedrake
animators- Nick Appleton, Nickolai Vorontsov, Jenny Lewis, Grigoris Leontiades
3D- Steven Azancot
compositors- Rok Predin, Steven Azancot