Dig That Funky Pattern

If you know of Cartoon Network's Chowder, then you know one of the show's trademarks are the funky animated patterns on the characters.

I'd been trying to think up how in the world they're able to pull that off. Actually lots of people are and it's been quite tricky trying to track down any sort of specific information.

One day after watching an episode of Chowder I got to thinking about how I might be able to pull off an animated pattern like in Chowder. Before you run to Flash, don't. Animating this is beyond Flash's capabilities. I had tried it a while back with masks but it just doesn't work.

I did throw the scene and "Soup" together in Flash and I made a "background" pattern with the Deco Tool. 

For Soup all I did was make sure the parts of his costume that was getting the pattern were a solid bright green. A color that in no way was going to end up in the scene. 

I then set about animating Soup's walk and him going back and forth. 

Once I had a decent enough loop animated in Flash, I then took the whole set up into Adobe After Effects. As that was one way I figured they could pull off those animated patterns.

So once I had everything imported into After Effects I simply set about applying a chroma/color keying effect. Also known as "green screen".

As you can see, it worked. However as far as my experience level goes, After Effects is only good for one pattern. Since you set the pattern on a layer below your animation.

If you've never worked with After Effects before it works with a layered timeline similar to Flash, but way more complex.

You could also likely pull this off with Adobe Premier, maybe. The results would be the same, good for one pattern.

So it seems that for now the secret behind those animated patterns in Chowder will remain a mystery. Unless of course there's some technique you can use to tying specific color key colors to specific patterns, in After Effects or Premier. There very well could be, but I've not stumbled across them yet.

Til next time, toonsters!