The Perfect Subaru

The only character in my current video is my friend's Subaru, which we took upstate to go camping. Most of the scenes are taken from what would be the passenger window, and the rest show the car in a backdrop of mountains. The whole animation is a tribute to the beautiful ride one can enjoy while traveling through upstate New York, an area most of my friends in the city don't know exists.

The Subaru is the quintessential camping trip car, so I wanted to get it just right. Here a few snapshots of that process. The one on the top right was my first, and then from there, I moved to the bottom, making notes of what was working and what wasn't until I reached the bottom of the second column. Aha! The perfect Subaru.

The finished version, with a sticker, of course.

More Illustration Assets

The way I'm building some of the scenes for my current project, which I'm calling "Red Sky" for now, resembles the way older films used a stationary car and conveyer belt to make it look like the characters were driving through traffic. The main difference is I have several layers, and I'll time the way each moves from right to left depending on how far away that part of the scene appears.

The first layer. This part will move at the slowest rate.

This is the second layer. This part will move at a medium rate.

This is the third layer. This will move so quickly it will basically be a blur.

This is the fourth layer. I'm not positive I will include it, but I may have them appear for one frame, as if the camera were really there on the road and had to navigate through trees to keep up with the cars.

And finally, here is everything together.

Initial Assets

Now that the storyboard is more or less settled, I'm diving into making the assets for each frame.

My thought process here is to make more than I need and then select the best. Some ideas might look great on index cards (or I should say, in my head), but others might not work at once drawn and animated.

I like the "extra" work just the same sometimes, though, because I get to learn more about the subject. In reviewing reference images for this project, I learned a little about the types of pine trees in the Catskill Mountains and the mountains with the highest elevation.

Here are a few from the first round of drawing: