The Waterman

In Summer 2019 and beginning of 2020 before and after I worked on The Shivering Truth Season 2, I worked on the 2D animation sequences of live action film "The Waterman". The problem with working on features is that they have the tendency of taking a long time from me working on it and it coming out. I thought I wrote about it already but apparently I have not.

Here is a compilation of some of my raw footage

Tina T. Hsu waterman reel from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

I was one of the lead animators on this project responsible for a big chunk of the rough/tiedown animation. The process was surprisingly design heavy as I had to come up with many solutions that dictated the final animation/art direction of the piece even though rotoscoping is used pretty heavily during the process, and I will go into it a little more in the next paragraph.

Since rotoscoping was used, many would think all I had to do was trace over live action footage and be done. That wasn't the case here. The character design was made for live action, which means it was not animation friendly. It took a while to figure out the right stylization for the designs to work as animation. On top of that, we could not shoot some of the footages in the setting it was supposed to be in.

As a result, there were many things I had to animate over from scratch. For example, all the reference footages of underwater scenes were shot on land. For the sequence where the heroine drowned, I had to animate her hair, clothing and lower body from imagination because she was fumbling on land in the reference and non of those elements looked like they were under water. In the sequence where waterman swam in the lake, the footage I was given was the actor pretending to swim on a table on his belly while losing balance once in a while. So I took a few key poses from the footage as reference and pretty much animated everything from scratch for that shot. The direction also wanted to minimize hard cuts whenever possible so coming up with ways to morph one scene into another was something I had to tackle. 

Once the rough/tied down animation is locked it was then passed onto another animator to do the final "cleanup" animation. The art direction wanted the animation to look like it was done on pencil and paper, and after some R&D we figured the best way to achieve that was still by drawing with pencil on paper. I wasn't involved in that part of the process since I had Shivering Truth S2 lined up already and had to leave the project for a chunk of time, so the other lead animator, Sam Neiman, was responsible with that part of the project.

More info on this project can be found on the DVD bonus featurette.