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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.
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?
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...
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Down pointing backhand index" aria-label="Emoji: Down pointing backhand index">
...to stylized motion and graphic shapes and tried to mix elements from both.
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Down pointing backhand index" aria-label="Emoji: Down pointing backhand index">
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">https://www.marvel.com/amp/artic...
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*
