"Dress Up" by Mike James
In October of 2006 Mike began tracing crude frame-by-frame outline drawings from filmed footage of a girl's diaphanous pink dress blowing up over her head. Of course, the key part, the inadvertant display of her ENTIRE naked torso, is quite sexy. But Mike was also interested in recording the immediate aftermath, her hapless efforts to keep the airy dress under control AFTER the initial full-body airing.
The process Mike used is called "rotoscoping" that is, animating frame by frame from live action. This renders a lifelike moment, but Mike wanted "hyper-real" movement. Film footage generally runs at 24 frames per second. Mike added a lot of "in-betweening" to stretch out the action, especially in the parts where the skirt was well up over her head.
These added frames stretch the animation out to a full 33 frames per second (even higher than NTSC video!) also adding a slightly slow-motion effect. "Achieving a flowing 'movement' is very important to getting a soft, feminine feel. She is moving rapidly, but gazelle-like. An added bonus to her smoothly sliding action is that it gives the viewer just a little longer time to soak it in."
This is old school, cell-by-cell animation, hundreds of hours spent hand-rendering 180 individually airbrushed pieces of art. It took a year. No computers were employed to assist in the art-making process. Only after the drawings were complete, were they scanned in and placed in an animation program. A BIG shout-out to Sean Henry of "Music for Cents" for his efforts in animating Mike's drawings.
So, though this brief animation runs a paltry 6 seconds, it's 6 seconds of full-on gorgeous, Disneyesque-grade movement.
What we display for you here is a deliberately low resoultion, slightly jerky, version of the final animation. (We don't wanna give away the store :-) The original high resolution version is being saved for a feature-length documentary on Mike's girl art. But enjoy this mini .gif version....and note the copyright!
For those of you with slower connection spoeeds the animation may run slow. If downloded however, it should should run at it's proper speed.
