A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation
To me Motion Comics and Motion Illustration is about taking material that was not designed for animation and bringing it to life with modern multimedia technology. In my previous posts here for Motion Comic Magic I have looked at how illustrations and artwork can be animated for music videos, motion comics, trailers for books, and to simulate what never existed. In fact I first talked about the idea of recreating what had never been built thorough motion-art and motion comics in my post a while back….re-creating the ‘Western River Expedition’ ride. That example used concept art, photos of models and other elements that Disney had in their archive, but it was mostly a slide show.
Recently I discovered the work of animator David Witt (quasi-interestingparaphernaliainc.blogspot.com) has done it one better with actually animating the characters in the Concept Art itself. It also brings up an interesting idea of how using multi-media could be pre-visulized how an robotic figure for a dark ride could move in the real world.
So here are some animations of Marc Davis’ concept art for the Western River Expedition ride that was never built at Walt Disney World…
Western River Expedition: Last Roundup from David Witt on Vimeo.
Western River Expedition: Horse on the Roof from David Witt on Vimeo.
Western River Expedition: Saloon Singer from David Witt on Vimeo.
David also just release a video that features the art and audio from the Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion. You can read more about it on his blog HERE.
To see all of David’s videos, visit his VIMEO profile.
