From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

1980s TV animation post production

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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1980s TV animation post production

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- [Instructor] In the previous movie, I gave you a quick overview of how you can take a puppet in Harmony or Flash and use it to simulate a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon character. All well and good. The only problem with that is you end up with something that looks very crispy, even with our best effort that's still sort of looking like it's too digital. So let's bring it into After Effects on layers, so we have all of our background, our effects layer, our character layer, all exported from whatever software used. It can be a PNG sequence, it can be a Swift, as long as they all have alpha channels, transparencies so that you can assemble them and I reassembled it in After Effects and various comps. So I'm going to show you how I put together to give you an idea of how you might approach this yourself. So first, of course, we have the background, our PNG, our title, "Santa Claw," our cheesy title. I hope there's no actual project out there called "Santa Claw." I apologize if there is. And here we have our effects layer. We have our snow layer. We have a Santa. I'm giving the game away here with this one. And then we have the character. So what I did was I created a second layer, a duplicate layer and I made it black and I made it slightly blurred and offset it very slightly. So what it does is creates this little shadow. And the reason being that these were all on a sheet of transparent cell and these were then placed on top, on the peg bars and shot by the camera. So the problem is if you don't have a little shadow like that, it can be too crisp. And if the light was very slightly off and there often was, you'd get a slight shadow and it'll be usually favoring one side or the other. And you could have a second shadow, if this head is on a separate layer, you might have a little shadow in there too. Again, if you watch a good-quality version of any of your favorite shows, keep an eye out and you'll notice this little tell. It's a little giveaway, a fingerprint. So on the layer outside, I just did the camera move. That was easy enough, this is all basic After Effects and again, if this is something that you don't know how to use in After Effects, I strongly recommend learning After Effects because it really collaborates beautifully with whether you're working with After Effects, Animate CC, or Toon Boom, Harmony. It can really be very, very useful. So in this pass, let's see what did I do here? We may have added an effect. Yep. So here we have noise. We can add different color balance effects. Some of these are too much. We can add interlacing. So there's a Venetian blinds in the After Effects filter and that creates the illusion of a video interlace. Now, that's one way of doing the interlace effect. The other way is to actually use your own image for that. So depending on which one you prefer, you might want a little more control over it. So let me show you how I did the alternate version in Photoshop. I created my own interlace. I know this is probably gruesome to look at because of those lines. I won't go anymore than that in case you get dizzy but you get the idea. I made one horizontal line. I made a smart object and I just duplicated it and then moved it down a few. And that creates that low-quality resolution, that VHS effect. The beauty of doing it as a single image is then you can then really control it. I changed the blend mode to classic color burn. I like that. And then I can change the transparency to something softer, more extreme. So I think about 33 was nice. And I also got a, I forget where I found this, somewhere online, so there's a little static VHS videotape. Those of us of a certain age will remember this and shudder. And by putting that at the beginning and the end of the video, it really makes it look like it's something that we've got off a wretched mangled old VHS videotape. So let me show you what this looks like finally rendered. So here's the final product. And now that you've followed through the process, you've seen it put together by me in 2020/2021, but if you were to show this to a person, there's a reasonable chance if they didn't know any better, they might think it was, especially with the VHS blur, the interlace, that it might just pass. So this is the kind of gold standard for these kind of projects is can you fool the public? Will the audience tell oh, wait a minute, that looks sort of modern. And it's surprisingly hard to remove all the little giveaways, all the tells. Just one little thing I did too, I noticed here as well, which is nice, I bent the belt but only for those three drawings. They're a symbol, they're like a little digital symbol. So a professional animator would probably look at it and go oh, I think you did in Harmony or I think you did it in Flash or whatever. But if it gets past the public, and that's the main thing, 'cause that's the target audience, and I think with the little color shading and all the rest of that too, I think if you were to put that into a videotape, I think you'd have a fighting chance of fooling the eye of many, many people. So anyway, that's it, that's a quick overview of Saturday morning cartoons and how you would begin to approach creating your own facsimile or homage.

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