Stas Santimov – “360 was a new experience for me”

The frighteningly good animations of Stas Santimov

This week, Creative Chair is in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, talking with animator Stas Santimov.

Often eerie in nature, his animations use short loops to tell stories. In 2017 he applied this style to a 360° animation.

You can see a lot more from Stas Santimov on Behance.

What are the influences behind the art style of your animations?

Most of all my art style was influenced by animation directors Priit Pärn, Bill Plympton, Igor Kovalev and a lot of short films on Vimeo and youtube from various directors.

What sort of tools do you use to create your illustrations and subsequent animation?

My main tools are TVPaint + Photoshop. The final result I am editing in After Effects.

I almost do not make sketches/character designs and keep all needed visual stuff in my head; except when I work in a team with other people and I need to show them something from the process.

On ‘Dogfaced’, what were the challenges of working with the 360 medium?

360 was a new experience for me. I do not work in 3d so I was wondering how it would work with 2d animation.

First, I drew everything very roughly and constantly checked the result in the GoPro VR player. Then I thought of using a 360 grid and it helped me a lot.

I didn’t have to check the image for errors so often. I animated all in Photoshop CS6 and there were no tools for working with 360 (as in the new versions of Photoshop CC). So, the most problematic places were areas where the image is deformed. (especially the top and bottom of the scene). I had to make an effort so that these elements did not look defective and stretched.

The ‘Dogfaced’ (2017) project says it is a teaser for the upcoming 360° motion comic. Is this still being developed?

No, but at first it really was a teaser. I planned to make an animated comic from such looped gif scenes and the viewer could switch between them as if reading a regular paper comic.

I thought the idea of a controlled 360 film would be interesting, but I didn’t figure out how to technically implement this.

I started to spend too much time on technical issues, reading articles about it. In addition, the video was rendered differently in the GoPro VR Player, YouTube and Vimeo and did not play correctly in many mobile applications. This is one of the reasons why I decided to return to this project when I’ll have more free time.

And finally, if you died and got reincarnated as a song, what would it be?

I think it will be Joy Division – Shadowplay