Apr 24, 2014

Polish Animator Michal Socha Creates the Most Creative Opening in "The Simpsons" History

Following the best opening in Simpsons history by Sylvain Chomet, we didn't think we'd see an animator surpass it in terms of creativity. I couldn't be happier to be wrong. This week's "Simpsons" opening by Polish filmmaker Michal Socha is a mind-blowingly gorgeous and creative trip inside Homer's brain. Socha is a surprising choice to direct a Simpsons opening, especially since he is not as well known as some of the other artists who have done openings. But the gamble paid off, and audiences were rewarded with one of the loosest and most entertaining Simpsons animated features ever produced.

And for the record, the Simpsons characters are CGI. Socha explained a bit about the process to the Animation World Network:

At first, we thought we could animate the Simpsons family using the classic frame-by-frame technique. After several tests, we discovered that we were not as good 2D animators as we thought! Our tests tended to lose characters and proportions, which was unacceptable. In this case, it was very important that each black silhouette reminded us of Homer, Bart, and Lisa. With classic frame-layout techniques, it takes a lot of time to finish a couch gag. We wanted this animation to be in a 2D style, so we mixed the two techniques to get a better result: ...... One of the difficult problems from a technical point of view was to arrive at a non-3D look for the characters. We tested different renderings that gave a cartoon-like look, but none of them worked well enough. We therefore decided to repaint every frame frame (by hand) and add secondary animation. It was a lot of fun work, but in the end we achieved the desired effect.