Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Nefarious and I made a new Pencil video that I think turned out well and as always, I had a ton of fun creating it. The headless effect was super easy to create. I did it by filming the whole thing on a tripod, so the background was steady, and then making sure that I had at least one shot at the end that she wasn’t in. Then when I created the animation, as well as having layers for the sparks and text, I created two layers from the camera, one of the motion image, and one of the empty background right behind it. Then I just used the eraser tool as needed — so yeah, ultra simple, but really fun. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, so the lighting changed very slightly (over the roughly ten second length… I wasn’t expecting that!) and you can see a slight difference in the light levels which manifests as the cut-out being visible. Oops! It could be manually fixed or re-shot on a clear-skied day (or indoors), but by the time I noticed I was half done and didn’t feel like doing any more work.

But this was maybe the most fun one yet to do. I really cut elements fairly short and would have loved to spend more frames — and more time — to the themes explored, especially the opening scene before the head disappears and it’s glowing blue, and the end when the green death ray is firing. Totally fun.

And oops! Caitlin just pointed out that I forget to deal with the shadow, which has a head! So with that and the halo problem, maybe I shouldn’t boast that it turned out well, but I stand by how fun it was.