Making Of

Animation Timelapse (the cassette player shot)

25 March, 2015 |  12 Comments | Video | by Hjalti Hjalmarsson

Earlier this month Manu did a great timelapse post and I decided to follow in his epic footsteps.

The shot in question is a bit tricky since the character is walking at a brisk pace, the camera is shaking, and there’s a lot of hand manipulation. For shots like these I prefer using a real prop when shooting my reference footage, but after a failed voyage to the thrift store to find a Walkman (or a similar cassette player) I was forced to improvise. With a bit of tape and creativity I made a make-shift “cassette player” from a cassette case and a broken hard drive.

This is the first time I try to record my work progress; I have much to learn. Hope you enjoy it! :)

– Hjalti


12 Responses

  1. Gavin Ball says:

    Very nice!

  2. BernAr says:

    Thanks for sharing Hjalti! Had to stop my eyes from flickering before being able to write a comment, but I found it very interesting to follow the whole progress. Keep up the good work and have a nice day with the whole team :-)

  3. Kevin says:

    Thank you for sharing the time lapse. It’s always interesting to see another animators process, even at high speed. The final shot looks great.

  4. Jerry Watson says:

    Yes, very nice work a good demo of blender in action. Reminds me of the good old days of the Amiga 2000 & NuTek Video Toaster with LightWave. I look forward to more of your work.

  5. Jack Case says:

    I always wonder how animators handle prop interaction in 3D. How does one insure that say fingers don’t clip through and that the objects appear to be firmly held in the hand without sliding around?

  6. congcong009 says:

    wow this is a really useful trick for animation. Thanks for sharing and nice blending!

  7. Hjalti Hjalmarsson says:

    Thanks for the feedback you guys :)

    Jack, usually it’s a matter of doing a “child of” or “copy transform” constraint (or something like that, depends on the situation) and then you just have to eye-ball it in your blocking and make sure that the hand/finger interaction is working in all your key poses …after everything is mostly working and you’ve moved on to the polishing phase, you have to go through your animation frame-by-frame looking through your main camera and make sure that it’s working in every single frame …I wish I could tell you that there was some magical “button” or something that did this but the truth is this: this is where the art comes in, this is where the animation craftmanship is needed and there’s no substitution

    …finger animation can be insanely tricky and it’s a craft in and of itself, as there are animators that specialize in hands/fingers

  8. gaston says:

    I am from Argentina I’m a professor of computer science excellent program. I need more data and mamuales. thx

  9. Akash Sankalpa fernando says:

    thank you blender

  10. Joeri says:

    Hahaha… pure Torture. Respect!

  11. Noah says:

    Great animation, lots of dedication there! One thing about cassette players that I remembered while watching this – they almost always loaded into a slot in the front part then get closed. This is to make sure the tape is aligned to the read head, because the player couldn’t close if the tape wasn’t all the way in.

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