Adds Zamm, “And then we took it to the next level of making it come to live with very clever transitions in and out of the sequences. It was a very nice collaboration between the four of us.”

Animation frame from Tooth Fairy 2.

The animatic outlined more than the animation, it also provided the effects house with details of how we wanted the animation to integrate into the live-action footage of the camera moving across the pamphlet from one image/animation to another. “It was invaluable,” says Zamm.

We were shooting the live-action while I was boarding the animated sequences. I would work in the Alex’s trailer and then carry my laptop onto set to show him the animatics between takes.

Once we were in animation, my lead animator Willie Castro animated in Flash. But there was one shot that pushed the animation beyond the limits of Flash. I had designed a shot where we started on a calendar and teeth up in the stars and then the camera pans off towards earth in the distance. Then we zoom all the way into Metro County, Florida to show where our character is.”

The end of a huge zoom in Flash that went beyond the limits of the software.

“Normally I would have approached this the way I’ve done big zooms in other projects where I create one giant piece of artwork and zoom in and out of it,” says Castro. “But this had such a drastic zoom that I went way beyond the maximum of the artwork size the Flash allows. So I had to break the zoom into pieces, copy and edit the edges of the artwork so I wouldn’t hit the maximum size. That zoom is actually many pieces carefully put together to look like one smooth move.”

Alex is thrilled with the finished product in his movie. “I love how vivid and colorful it is. It came out incredibly well. It’s an amazing little complex and dense bit of animation that I’m thrilled we were able to pull off on the schedule and budget and you guys pulled out all the stops to make it an A-Plus sequence in the movie.”

Tooth Fairy 2 is now available on DVD.

If you want to hear more of my conversation with director Alex Zamm and my lead animator Willie Castro on the making of this animated sequence, you can click HERE to listen to the 20 minute MP3 file.

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Mark Simon, is the co-founder of SellYourTvConceptNow.com and the owner of Animatics & Storyboards, Inc. and the animation producer for Tooth Fairy 2. You can join Mark online for his webinar, Producing A Profit In Animation with animation producing legend Max Howard (Lion King, Iron Giant, etc) at www.HitMakerWebinar.com.