I didn’t get much of my #SpiderVerse work released online but I did get to animate this Gwen drumming shot SO! here’s a very long thread about less than two seconds of #IntoTheSpiderVerse

Julie Bernier Gosselin was the lead on the sequence and offered the shot since she knew I play drums and would love to animate it (and because she’s awesome)
Side note: Julie is not on Twitter but Twitter should still know her work on #SpiderVerse was KEY. Seriously, it’s insane.

As a drummer myself it was amazing to get to animate this. I also though hey! I can play drums, I can animate, this shouldn’t be too hard!
But then it was. So hard. Animating drumming is SO hard. Ugh. Why did I even like drums in the first place?

Since we were working on 2s w/o motion blur I studied all the 2D animated drumming I could find: from realistic motion and proper drum technique...

...to stylized motion and graphic shapes and tried to mix elements from both.

If you frame through it you’ll see that Gwen is animated on 2s while the camera, her drum kit and her smears are all on 1s —It took a bit of experimentation to get that balance to work.

The smears were made using a mix of multiple drumsticks, multiple arms, geometric shapes and hand drawn lines.

I animated her playing traditional grip (the ‘jazzy’ way to hold the left stick sideways, as opposed to holding both sticks the same way) to subtly mirror her style as a hero: she uses her classical dance background to kick ass and her traditional music training to play punk rock

It was a tiny thing to try and expand on the same idea @jasonlatour talks about here: https://www.marvel.com/amp/articles/movies/spider-gwen-s-co-creator-jason-latour-explains-her-ballet-shoes-in-spider-man-into-the-spider-verse

I shot my own video ref and then studied some great drummers. My main inspiration was Cindy Blackman Santana because 1) she’s also a jazz drummer who plays rock with traditional grip and 2) she just kicks so much butt:

And also gave Gwen an empty paint bucket to keep her drumsticks hoping some othe drummer out there can relate.

At the time I was pretty happy with the end result. Of course now I can only see things I’d change if I could jump back into it. Probably redo it from scratch because what did my last year self know about animation??

I guess this also goes to show how much work can go into a couple seconds of animation. Just repeat the process a few thousand times and you’ll only need to go through it all over again in cloth, hair, FX, lighting, com... *tweet slowly fades to black*