Making Moebius's Arzach Move

I love Moebius's art so much that I wanted to see it move. So last year I started a project animating panels from Moebius's "Arzach."

There have been a few attempts to animate his work but none were that successful nor recent. I also thought it'd be easier to do this than other potential projects.

First, I had to decide how this would look. Was I going to string each panel together to make a seamless story? It became clear that taking that approach would require a lot of retouching with each panel having its edges extended to fill a 16:9 aspect ratio. I didn't want to dedicate that kind of time to Photoshopping.

Instead, I decided to maintain the integrity of Moebius's panels by limiting the movement to inside of those panels, as though you were flipping through a book with moving panels…like the newspapers in Harry Potter:

I started by recording myself turning the pages of the Arzach book using an iPhone 6 Plus. Next, I scanned the pages of the book and retouched each panel in Photoshop.

For the first page, I imagined it fitting the full screen with Arzach and his pterodactyl flying into the frame, the sky slowly moving and the figures stopping in the spot of the original book panel. This required extending the background, which was easy. More difficult was cutting the figures out and filling the hole they left. This was a challenge for the entire project because Moebius used a lot of cross-hatching and the variances of the watercoloring are difficult to mimic.

There was even more retouching on the figures to make the wings, cape and other parts move. I wasn't going for full animation, just the feeling of some movement:

The multiple images in different positions and the background were all imported into After Effects where all the animation, compositing and masking was done.

Despite the challenges, I got the look I wanted:

One of the main reasons for starting this project was to learn how to use After Effects. In future posts, I'll have tutorials explaining how I accomplished certain outcomes.

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