BARBIE
|
TYPE: FEATURE CREDITS |
COMPANY: POWERHOUSE VFX |
YEAR: 2023 |
ROLE: MATTE PAINTING SUPERVISOR |
Working on this Barbie movie end credit animations was a ridiculous amount of fun for me. We were able to explore a creative and whimsical approach to each shot to maintain the both the integrity of the original dolls and how they moved and were played with while bringing them to life in a toy-like way. I’ve compiled a short breakdown of the pieces I created and snapshots below.
The iconic original Barbie animation was created as a combination of 3d scanned elements, cg modeled and animated pieces, and digitally matte painted and animated hair pieces to perfectly match the original Barbie photography.
Starting with the photo of Ken’s original packaging, Ken’s smirk was created entirely as individually matte painted keyframes inside photoshop for a quirky photo real stop motion inspired animated smirk.
Midge’s mommy animation was also created in a motion graphics style animation in Nuke. Starting with a single photo, it was broken into pieces, painted and keyframe animated.
In the dog photo shoot, an attempt to get the dog poses correct was made, but without having tie-downs the dog moved around too much to be used as footage. In the end these elements had to be built from scratch with the photos we had. I ended up cutting and painting them into a bunch of matte painted elements that could be individually animated through a complex expression linked nuke script.
Babysitting skipper was also created with keyframe matte painted pieces in photoshop in a stop motion style, and hand drawn tear animation cycles using procreate.
Teresa’s dance was created by using on set photography of several different poses, and breaking up all those elements in photoshop into layers that were animated with expression linked keyframes in Nuke.
Nikki was my first attempt testing out a matte painted approach to projecting painted pieces onto geometry in nuke for a 2.5 d hybrid animation approach. In the end we had a lot of control and this informed how we would move forward on other shots.
