Speaker 1: This video is going to be all about merging 2D animation with live action film. This video was made with the help from the great people supporting me on Patreon. So please check the link in the description to see all of the cool rewards you can get over there and what kind of goals we can meet with your help and support. Thank you. A while ago I made a video talking about merging 2D animation with 3D animation and people were really interested in it so I decided that I would give some analysis with the subject of merging live action film with 2D animation too. Here are a few examples we'll be looking at. These ones I think are really good examples of something. If you have any other good examples, please feel free to post them in the comments below so that other people can check them out and learn from them as well. I'm going to go through the various ways that I've seen the two mediums creatively mixed together, what the kind of effect is for each of these and how it can be used and when it's appropriate to use each one. The main one is to have 2D animation hand-drawn on top of live action frames. Using digital, this is very achievable and I'm going to show you how you can do this. I'm going to show you how to do this in the program that most of you are familiar with which is Adobe Flash. You can't really talk about this subject at length without talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This film was such a revolution in the subject of merging 2D animation with live action and it broke barriers that people before thought wouldn't be able to be broken. But why is it that this animation and the integration used in this animation puts it in a league of its own? For me, there are two major points at which it excels. Firstly, it's attention to detail and how adaptable the animation is to the scene. For example, in this scene where Eddie bumps the lamp, the animators painstakingly updated the lighting on Roger Rabbit's body. So the second point is that they demonstrated that the animated characters could fully interact with the live action objects. So not only could the objects interact with the characters, so they would animate the character to update whenever something like a chair was shifted. But then for them to be able to have the character move or affect a live action object, because essentially for every time they had to do that, they performed a magic trick. They had to make, for example in this shot, the handkerchief. They had to make the handkerchief move and then animate it later, which is a crazy concept really and it is like watching a magic show. So they had to plan out each shot really carefully and they used a lot of things like invisible wires. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably the biggest example of that, but there are others as well. Passion Pictures with Jamie Hewlett, they have consistently pushed the boundaries of what you can do with animation, which I love. So I am fascinated by everything that they've made over the years. In this recent commercial, it's really cool what they've done. They've had some really nice stylised animation mixed with live action film and the results are just really incredible. In our minds, it makes us feel like these characters are real and we could meet them and they're like real people just like us. There are people who are using softwares like Flash to do that and basically how you do that is you shoot the live action first with the plan that the 2D animation is going to be drawn in a layer over the top of your live action footage. Lots of softwares now support this and others you can find ways to allow it to do that. Alright, so I'm going to convert this video clip into an image sequence, so I'm just going to create a composition from the selection, I have the camera, the pan, I'm going to go like that. Okay, so I'm just going to take that bit. You want to keep these quite short if you're using Flash because it's not really adapted to it anyway. Then let's shorten the sequence to that. So I'll shorten the sequence so that's all we've got, that's all that's going to export is that. So I'm just going to go file, export, add to render queue and let's change it here to a JPEG sequence because with JPEG sequences you can compress them more, they take up less space. If you want to do PNG sequence that's more kind of uncompressed. So we'll save it in a file, make sure you save it within an empty folder, click render. It's going to render each of those frames that you can see as its own image. So then we can open it up in Flash. We can see all the images here. Okay, so now I literally just have it open in a folder, take all these images and drag them in. Now if you've got a lot of them you might want to just drag them in, like drag these ones in first then drag the next ones in. That's what I'm going to do to make sure it just doesn't crash. Let's do that in that next one. There are probably other methods but this is the one that I have been using and it's worked quite well. It's very simple to understand. So then we've got them all and they're basically all stacked on top of one another as you can see. So we select, make sure you've got all of them selected and click distribute to keyframes and that should hopefully spread them all out onto their own keyframes in order as well. So that makes it really good, makes it really quick to do. And then the other ones are here. So I'll do the same for this one, distribute to keyframes, just like that. There we go. So now you've got live action footage laid out as an image sequence in Flash. And from there, let's see if we can draw on it. And so I've created a new layer above it and here we just, you know, create our blank keyframes and those are the frames. It's just another layer on top that we can draw on. It's as simple as that. So I'll show you that. This is a very simple way of doing it. In this, I am literally just improvising and because of the simplicity of this scene, I'm able to improvise completely. I'm just improvising very quickly, but it's really anything that you can imagine. You can just put on top and it feels very nice. It feels very free to be able to do something like this. Live action characters inside of 2D animation and 2D sets using a green screen effect where you can digitally remove the green screen afterwards. The results can be quite fun and quite cool. The software I would recommend to do this would be to use Adobe After Effects. The other one, which I don't see talked about as much, but it can be very useful as a creative tool, is to simply do a transitional cut between scenes of animation and scenes of live action. And I've seen some really inventive ways that this can be used as a storytelling device out of the black by Royal Blood. It's a cool music video. What they've done with the music video is so creative and this is a great example of the method I talked about where you do a creative transitional cut in the footage and cuts to 2D animation. And they've definitely used this to overcome a practical limitation that they had with the film where the aliens do some really gory crazy stunts to, you know, in this battle. Here on this first one they lifted the mask off of character and as they lift the mask it changes to 2D animation. I thought that was a really good choice of where to cut to 2D animation and also how they did it. They actually did it with this cool little effect and that just integrated the two a little bit better. It's just amazing to watch and so entertaining as well. One of the best parts about using this method is that when you jump into 2D animation you can do things suddenly that weren't possible with the live action part of it. And in fact on my latest film that I made, music video collaboration I was part of, this is exactly the kind of thing that we did. We used some quick transitions to tell part of the story in 2D animation. The 2D animation helped to creatively bring out the story in that segment. Also because practically it would have been very very difficult to have shot that section as a live action film. You can separate the two mediums through something like a screen or a book or something. In this example they used it, it's a very crude example, but it just shows how simple it can be where in Space Ghost they basically have a TV screen and so when they look through the TV screen they see a live action guest appearance. On the other side of the TV screen it's all animated and I thought this was a really creative separation where they could get the best of both mediums. So they could have these wacky 2D animated characters but they could also have the live action guest appearances. The TV screen separating them was an adequate device to do that. They just needed to mask the live action camera in the TV screen and that's all they had to do. And from there the real obstacle was to match up the dialogue and to keep that funny witty sort of improvisation that you have in an interview. It's a really funny show as well, it's a classic in my eyes. It's just very interesting how they're able to keep that dialogue fresh and spontaneous even though there is the barrier between 2D animation and live action. The difficulties for merging 2D animation, the difficult areas that I recommend that you try to avoid if you can, but you can do them but it will just be harder. Any kind of camera movement with your live action footage. So if you move the camera at all you've got to update that for the 2D animation and it just makes things a little bit more tricky at times. So for the easiest shots you're going to want to use tripod shots where the camera is completely still. You don't have to update the 2D animation at all to match the live action. Live action affecting live action objects. So anything where the animated character has to pick up something or interact with anything. Those shots are difficult but they're not impossible. But it would require a lot more planning just like you've seen in Roger Rabbit. Actor performances such as eye tracking. So if you've got a live action actor the performance is going to be more challenging for that actor because they're actually interacting with things that aren't there. And that's actually done a lot in Hollywood these days. A lot of Hollywood films they're acted out in front of green screens and then they're animated in post-production. That makes the actor's job a lot harder and you have to give clear direction. You might need a prop to show where the eye level is so that they're not just looking off into the distance. Last notes I would say bringing in another medium should always be used to better tell the story and use each medium to its advantage. Live action has some great benefits. It's a realistic capture of the world that we live in. So it's kind of more valid. It's got more verisimilitude. The camera behaves a lot like the human eye in how it works. How it takes in light and everything. So we can relate to it fully and it's as if we're there watching it. It's great for capturing actors' performances and some spontaneous improvisations. Actors are able to just be themselves in front of the camera in as many different takes as they want. So it also allows editors pick and choose the best moments instead of having it all planned out beforehand. 2D animation also has benefits. The audience already knows that it's watching a construction of something and that gives it a whole different feel to it. Nothing's there by accident and it's all been constructed. And what's more you can change anything about it by drawing. So you can literally design it down to the tiniest detail how you imagine it. More than that it transcends the boundaries of practical things that you need. So literally whatever you can draw you can have in your animation. So the limits are just expanded quite a lot. So really the main limit in 2D animation is your imagination and it's how much you're willing to work, how much you're willing to draw. So the marriage of these two mediums is a really cool thing. Where the two integrate to me that's really exciting. So I recommend you guys go out there, shoot some footage and see what you can do creatively. And yeah just have fun with it and experiment and play about. I want to thank again my Patreons. Special thanks to Joel Ukeni, he's one of our supporters. Check out AnimatorGuild.com as well for more tutorials, more things like source files. I've got an online store if you want to support the channel in that way. And yeah I will see you in the next video, goodbye.