The Mighty Apollo
I created a hand-drawn animation to help visualise the psychological aspects of a story about Paul Anderson, an Australian strong man known as ‘The Mighty Apollo’.
Client: Plot Media
Year: 2017
Medium: Col Erase pencils, Brush & India ink, Photoshop, After Effects
Collaborators: Nick Barkla (Director), Jamie Houge & Virginia Kay (Producers).
The Process
Context: Plot Media hired me to animate two minutes of footage for use in their pitch / proof of concept teaser trailer for a documentary they were producing, The Mighty Apollo.
The film tells the story of an Australian strongman Paul Anderson (The Mighty Apollo) who survived a horrific accident, and later went on to perform even more death defying feats.
Brief: The producers were seeking hand-drawn, 2D animation, that would recall 1930s cartoons, and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir.
The film examines Paul’s psychology, and I was asked to help convey the less conventional aspects of that part of the story. The animated scenes tell the behind-the-scenes story of Paul’s relationship with his alter-ego, which changes from benevolent and encouraging to threatening and demeaning.
Approach: First, I created storyboards based on the provided script. After some revisions, we proceeded to an animatic to test timing with the sound cues.
From there, I used traditional animation timing sheets to plan out key frames and inbetweens, before drawing every layer and frame on paper by hand. These were batch scanned and batch edited with Photoshop, before being assembled into animated form in After Effects.
Hand painted animation cels
Using simple brushes, india ink, A4 copy paper, and a home-made lightbox I painted the animation cels in a traditional way.
The animation was made at twelve frames per second, and mostly used between three to five layers per frame (background, props, character, character details, foreground).
Two minutes is 120 seconds. 120 seconds is 1440 frames. 1440 frames by an average of four layers is over 5000 individual drawings.
Above: Selected film stills from the final animated section.
Results: I was able to create the final animation to a very, very tight deadline. The production crew found that having such a unique element as part of their pitch trailer allowed them to clearly show the psychological parts of their story, and helped open doors to show the project to potential investors.
In addition to the animated components, I provided Plot Media with storyboards and animatics (rudimentary wire frame animations) for other sections of the trailer and film. These helped convey the story to their audiences, separating archival footage from psychological drama.
Below: A section of work in progress images from the studio (character design roughs, tools used, and the final volumes of paper cels).
