Many of them are static, but still, we needed a way to save the layout team’s time and sanity. As far as I am aware, it is inevitable though, or it would take a tremendous effort just to correct this, involving setting many keyframes manually, and even then, the result might not be so stable.ĭuring layout on Dilili à Paris by Michel Ocelot, our team created the layout for more than a thousand shots. You will notice that the corner of the camera seems to be moving about during the movement. Focus on the bottom left corner, where you might recognize a familiar ear behind the bushes. And if you want to zoom in on something at the same time, it gets even trickier, as the following demo clearly shows.īut besides the difficulty to set up this camera movement, there is another problem: it looks bad.

This however is always tedious to set up: if you go from one position to another, you need to adjust the X and Y rotation of the camera. In our 3D world inside Blender, things are different: you can draw your sets undistorted (straight lines appearing straight), and actually pan the camera. Large sets had to be drawn distorted, in a way resembling curvilinear perspective, so that they would look like the camera is rotated around. Therefore there weren’t actually any real pans (camera rotations), only tracking shots (the camera moving perpendicular to its viewing direction). The sets, not the camera, moved below to give the illusion of the camera moving through the scene. These rostrum cameras were always perpendicular to the sets and cels, looking straight down at them. Things got even more complex when multiplane cameras became somewhat commonplace. In the olden days, film studios used rostrum cameras and carefully calculated layout sheets to animate these cameras. This article demonstrates a camera setup we created to solve this problem. A problem commonly encountered during layout of a 2D film is that of getting nice and smooth camera movements when your camera is zooming and panning, that is, rotating about its center. Some aspects are explored in other articles, but the film layout is one of particular interest to us. As you may have heard, we at Les Fées Spéciales have been using cutout animation techniques extensively on our previous projects.

Blender cutout animation