Today I’ve got the confirmation that my talk for Libre Graphics Meeting was accepted! That means you have a real chances to meet me among the other visitors of this awesome event during 2-5 May in Vienna. My talk will be about Remake – our build system for animation projects. I’m going to give some explanations about its principles, future and show some live examples. Although it’s about Remake, I won’t refuse any related questions about Morevna Project and Synfig. ^__^ See ya on the meeting!

One image instead of thousand words.

Keyframes production sheet (18.03.2012)

And everyone knows that I love posting “work-in-progress” drafts. ^__^

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I would like to thank everyone who donating to our keyframes drawing campaign – thank you for believing in us!

We are encourage everyone to share information about the donation campaign we running and for that purpose we have prepared a few banners (below). If you have a website suitable to place any of them – please help us to promote Morevna Project! Thank you!
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Meanwhile Nikolay struggle with keyframes, Erik Castillo has finished the promised 3D model of soldier. I was a little worried about the lack of such model, because we need it in shot 35 for keyframes drawing (this is a very complex shot where the soldiers are thrown into the air). Luckily Erik did best to cover us here. Now I can proceed to playing with shot 35.

Also we will need soldier models in shot 07 – it is where camera does a long turn around Ivan and Morevna and soldiers getting up from the ground and surrounding them. For this we will need 5-6 variations of this basic soldier to use all them in shot 07. It will be the next step. Stay tuned!

Today I want to write a little about our keyframes drawing workflow.  The described workflow is not something that we come up at once, but this is something that formed up spontaneously during the last week.

Nikolay uses MyPaint to draw the keyframes and some edits are done in GIMP or Krita. Thanks to the GIMP’s ora plugin and native support for ora files in Krita we can seamlessly edit MyPaint files everywhere. Well, in fact Krita’s ora support isn’t that perfect (2.3.3 here), but we can live with that.

So, our basic working format is OpenRaster (ora). My task is to prepare all animatic images – compose them together with all reference data into ora files, so Nikolay can proceed directly to the drawing. We have a special production sheet to identify pending, prepared and finished keyframes. I also mark keyframes which are considered relatively “easy”.

Keyframes production sheet

Nikolay looks at this sheet when he needs to choose next keyframe to draw. After the keyframe is drawn he sends me ora file for review. My job is to look for style consistency and general quality issues. If the keyframe is accepted then Nikolay moves to next one in the list. If there is a issues then I put my notes onto separate layers together with some explanation sketches, send the file back and process repeats. On the images below you can see how it’s usually looks like.

Typical "work-in-progress" screen

Having a production sheet allows Nikolay to proceed with other keyframe while I’m doing review, so the work keeps to be intensive.

Also we can’t go without phone conversations – although Nikolay is quite familiar with the matter it takes from 10 to 30 minutes for discussions on each keyframe. Discussion can take place at any moment, so the mobile phone is an only option for that.  Although Nikolay lives in other town, we are lucky to reside in the same region – that allows us to have all talks at the flat rate.

Needless to say that we have certain conventions about file naming which allows us to keep all data in the order. I will not cover them here as it may sound boring and there is a high probability that those conventions will change with a time.

That’s all my notes about the current workflow. If you would like to see the finished keyframes please watch the recent images page at our wiki. Cheers!

OK, the main event of this week is the official launch of donations campaign. It took much of my time to prepare it, but I think it worth the efforts.

With that event the project enters new phase – keyframes drawing – and since the 1st of March Nikolay is working on them. And here’s some results.

Shot 51 - Morevna KF1 - WIP

Shot 51 - Morevna KF1 - No Shadow

Shot 51 - Morevna KF1

Shot 51 - Ivan KF1 - WIP

Shot 51 - Ivan KF1 - No shadow

Shot 51 - Ivan KF1

Also, to celebrate the beginning of the new phase of the project we decided to update our website theme with the new banner to better fit with current status of the project. Nikolay quickly made some cool artwork and now you can see the result (you may need to clear your browser cache to see the changes). Goodbye, old theme!

We was so excited with new artwork so after playing with new banner we accidentally got a new wallpaper done.

Morevna Project Wallpaper #2 (1920x1080)

That’s all stuff for today. Stay tuned – the next week is going to be hot!

OK, today is the 1st of March and that means 2 things: Nikolay proceeds to drawing keyframes and we are officially launching the donation campaign.

Please spread a word and help us to reach the goal!

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Damn, I just can’t handle myself! I never had such fun collaborating on drawings!

Me and Nikolay Mamashev drawing

Shot 50 - keyframe WIP

Shot 50 - finished keyframe

Ok, folks, guess what I have for you? That’s right – the demo snapshot! It’s just few days left before the project will be to be kicked to the new phase, so it’s good time to publish things like that. ^__^

But that’s not all! This week Nikolay finally got his Cintiq tablet arrived and he already did some cool concept drafts. He is absolutely bizarre about contributing new keyframes and I can’t wait to see them!

Morevna Draft

Ivan Draft

Morevna's Katana Sleeve

And that’s not all again. To demonstrate our approach for backgrounds Nikolay made a quick wallpaper with “realistic” version of Morevna. We hope that you’ll like it.

Morevna Project Wallpaper (1920x1080)

After two weeks of trying, searching and discussions the keyframer artist is finally chosen. This will be Nikolay Mamashev – he is ready to redraw all keyframes of Morevna Project Demo in two months. Decision is final and won’t be changed. Congratulations! ^_^

Personally I’m glad about this choice, because I know Nikolay as very responsible and dedicated person (we have worked together on some commercial projects). He have great skills in drawing as well as in vectorization and animation – which means he knows all the guts. Another good thing is that he is living in the nearby town and we will be able to work in direct contact, not purely online only. Finally, he is also a big fan of anime and have a strong faith in Morevna’s future. We are still waiting for his Cintiq tablet to arrive and after that he will be ready to start the work.

Also, we will need a support from the community to pay for his work. I’m going to start fundraising campaign next week and I really hope it will success. All preparations will definitely take some time. See you next week!

(r)Evolution of Morevna. Artwork by Nikolay Mamashev.