All the World
About a year ago I had been working with a colleague of mine, Galen Fott of BigFott Studios, on an animated feature for Weston Woods and Scholastic titled “All the World” based off of the 2010 Caldecott Honor-winning book by the same title. I have worked with BigFott Studios off and on for the past five years on multiple animated short films (most from the “Teacher from the Black Lagoon” series of children’s books) as a freelance animator, so when I was approached to work on “All the World”, I was excited to hear that this project would be animated traditionally on paper (not using Flash as we’d done in the past on previous projects). It had been almost five years since I last animated on paper (admittedly, that was while I was still in college for Traditional Animation at VanArts), but I was still stoked about the idea.
I’d been using a Wacom Cintiq 21UX to do most of my animating in Flash since my graduation from VanArts, so the prospect of animating on paper again was very enticing. Once I saw the beautiful illustration work in “All the World” by the wonderfully-talented Marla Frazee, I was hooked, and could not wait to dive into the project! Galen took pains to make sure that each of the animators under his direction replicated the beautiful line-work that Marla had created by using black Prismacolor colored pencils to do our final, clean-line animation with. We also added in some subtle shading with the pencils to really gain that extra touch to make the illustrations in the book come to life, literally, for the film!
It was a wonderful experience and opportunity, and it felt great to have the animation papers between my fingers, flipping them back and forth to make sure that my actions were smooth and that my line-work was consistent. It was truly an honor to work on such a beautiful film, and I hope that from the clip above you can get a sense of the artistry that has gone into this amazing animated work! If you watch closely, you will notice a segment of the trailer where the characters are all playing musical instruments. That scene was animated by yours truly, and took about a month and hundreds of sheets of animation paper to finish! It’s a tedious process, but the results are absolutely worth all the meticulous work involved!
On September 12th, 2011, at 8:36 pm Kathy Talbott wrote:
Kevin that is soooo cool, I will have to buy the book to read the story! And where can you get a full video?
On September 12th, 2011, at 9:05 pm Kevin wrote:
Thanks, Kathy! Unfortunately, the video can only be purchased by schools at the time being, and runs with a rather expensive pricetag (since they show it to classes of children at a time). However, every now and then Weston Woods puts out a compilation DVD of several of these videos on one disc. If a compilation containing “All the World” becomes available, I’ll let you know!