BTS - Emperor's Face (Patreon)

Hello, all!The shot of the Emperor talking at the start of the recent TIE Fighter animation was one of the trickiest shots in the whole thing!Here's a behind the scenes (BTS) look when I started off with some reference shots from Return of the Jedi:

 After several hours, the best I could do was the following.

They kind of also had a hard time drawing him in the original 1994 game opening as well, which made me feel a little bit better.

 Anyway, luckily Maki was on hand to fix the face up! If you've been following these behind the scenes posts or looked at the Alien: Monday art book, you'll already know that she is a godsend when it comes to anatomy and animation timing, but she also fixes up faces a lot too. Anyway, here's what she came up with after a ten minute paintover in Photoshop.

It's much closer to the stills from the movie. She couldn't go absolutely crazy with it, as I'd already completed over a hundred frames of animation using my dodgy-looking face, so she tried to keep as much of my underlying drawing as possible so I wouldn't have to scrap the whole sequence and start again from scratch. It's a big improvement though.

And then I went over it pretty much as-is and reanimated the hundred frames with Maki's fixed face likeness. The final result is below:

Maybe a bit too much head movement, and some of my mouth drawings aren't exactly perfect, but on the whole I think it turned out OK!

The lesson here is never go ahead and draw, animate, colour and shade a hundred frames before showing the work to your producer/quality checker!

And next post... Star Destroyers!

-Paul