Oil painting animation

In March, when the Covid situation just started to escalate in the US, I started working at Bent Image Lab on a oil paint rotoscope/animation spot. The spot was painted by me and another animator tracing/translating live action footage with oil paint on glass and photographing each painting with dragonframe. We initially pitched to animate on 4s, but eventually settled on 3s due to client request.

This is raw footage from shot 2 of the spot.

Oil painting animation from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

The technique was an interesting mix of 2D, painting and stop motion which strangely fits many of my skill sets, but was definitely a new challenge for me. While I enjoy painting with traditional media, I always found oil paint a little too much hassle for personal work. I have not touched oil painting since a portrait painting class in grad school, which was close to a decade ago.

I soon found out that oil painting 8-9 hours a day in a not very ergonomic setup was far more taxing physically and mentally than I anticipated (especially during a pandemic). We were using oil paint straight out of the tube as much as possible for color consistency. To make sure the paint does not just scrape off from slick glass surface, I refrained from diluting paint and used much softer brushes usually made for watercolor/acrylic paint. Another challenge we faced was getting paint supply as many art supply stores were either shut down or bought out by I assume bored people sheltering in place.

Depending on what was happening on screen, each frame took me from 30-90 minutes. Between each frame, we had to scrape off the full painting. Considering supply, my wage and not considering other expenses, it feels like destroying a $40-$100 paintings every frame. I was a bit terrified by the process, but it was also kind of cathartic. After the job was done, the client told us they wanted to preserve some of the paintings. But since that was not coordinated beforehand all the paintings were destroyed during animation.

Here is a note on working with live action and rotoscope. It is a very useful tool in many situations, but it also relies on live action footage that is not always compatible with animation/the medium we were using. For a fast turnaround job that goes way beyond line work like this one, there was no wiggle room for me to fix and control many aspects of the finished work. Shots with subtle movements and facial closeups were especially challenging and time consuming as accuracy becomes an issue and subtle movements tend to get lost in the medium. Shots with dynamic movement tend to work much better for this medium.

Looking back, there were many could be better moments on this project, but given the fact that we somehow pulled it together during a pandemic I think we did our best. I can do without oil painting for another decade for sure.

some BTS videos and photos

Cleaning after each frame from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.