Ducobu Président !

About

This project is a collaboration between the original "Ducobu’" comic-book illustrator Godi and us. We imagined a story where Ducobu is dreaming of seeing himself as the president of the Saint Potache school during a car trip, and Godi drew every element we needed, on separate layers so we could animate it on Adobe After Effects. 

We began by colorizing Godi’s illustrations before putting them on After Effects. The sequence is a mix of classic 2D frame-by-frame animation, when Ducobu or Léonie are walking for example, and also 3D animation. The green car is a 2D drawing assembled in 3D so we could make it move over the road with a slight perspective parallax effect.

The process

We began by sketching some ideas where Ducobu became the president of Saint Potache school, and we told a story with these ideas in a first storyboard.

The second storyboard was just an evolution of the precedent, with other ideas that were more realizable and suitable for our animation style.

Our last storyboard is the most faithful to the actual sequence. We used it to do a video animatic to check if the rhythm of the edit was good. And we sent it to Godi, so he could draw the elements we needed to conceive the title sequence.

We asked him to draw every scene with separate elements to make the animation process easier for us afterwards. So, for example, he drew all cars without wheels so we could turn the wheels without having to detach them manually from the car.

Then we colorized all of his drawings in the same style as the original comic book. In the beginning we wanted to create a more graphical sequence, with just four colors : yellow, red, and black and white, to play with Ducobu's or Leonie’s patterns in a more Saul Bass kind of style. But the movie is very colorful so we decided to colorize all the sequences as if it was a real cartoon of Ducobu.

The next step was the animation of the sequence. We did everything on Adobe After Effects, with a lot of different techniques. The cars used the 3D After Effects tools, to move it along the very bulged roads. We used the plugin Duik Bassel to rig our characters and to create walk cycles. And everything else is just a lot of keys to bring every element alive.

Adobe Live

We did an Adobe live to talk about this title sequence and how we made it. We also talked about how we work inside Brett & Cie.

Credits

2022

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