It’s the last days of keyframes drawing campaign and this week was especially interesting, because besides of usual drawing of Ivan and Morevna Nikolay was working on the shots where we have many new characters. They all are appear in the Demo only once or twice, but some of them will play a significant role in the whole movie. So you will see a lot of new faces – Doctor-Sister with her husband Businessman, Mechanic-Sister with her husband Rocker, Rapper (who is a husband of Priestess-Sister) and musicians from the bar. Some of them more detalized, some less but still it’s been a big work. I don’t name who is who, I think it’s easy to guess by looking at the picture.

Regarding to the whole keyframes drawing process. We are on the edge of the deadline (1st of May), but we still have 2 days. It was decided to use 3D models for some long-distance shots with complex camera turns and movements (I’m referring to shots 07, 38, 41 and 53). So we have 7 keyframes left. I’m sure Nikolay will finish them in the next two days.

Keyframes production sheet (29.04.2012)

It looks like our fundraising campaign is failing. It’s 2 days left and we still have $1619 to go. Anyway, it’s awesome to see that we have done that far and we are very grateful to everyone who gave us their support! The fact that you all believe in this project make us feel so warm and we will do our best to continue with our efforts and proof that your faith is no waste. Thank you!

Tomorrow I’m taking off in my trip to Libre Graphics Meeting 2012  (2-5 May, Austria) and exactly at the 1st of May I’ll be on the road.  I’ll post the final report about the keyframes drawing and our plans for the future as soon as I will get back. And of course if some of you have a chance to be at this great event – will be happy to meet you there!

Finally, it’s been a long time since I was posting my favourite “work-in-progress” drafts. They are kind of outdated already (since all those keyframes are finished), but I won’t feel as myself if I won’t post them now. ^__^

Everyone, have exciting week!

Today I want to talk a little about the ways we cheat at drawing. ^__^

When you start drawing a characters you usually have “front” and “side” concept reference images. And when you need 3/4 view at some gradation it’s always a bit tricky part. And here’s Synfig to the rescue! No, it’s not a tracing time yet, but we can use Synfig’s tweening capabilities to extend our concept references. For example, this is how we get guides for Ivan’s head at particular angle.

Notice how your brain rebuilds the inbetween positions of the head basing the guide lines as references.

The next helpful trick is to use photos as references. Yes, sometimes to figure out the correct look of some elements at certain angles or positions we have to go with shots like you see below.

Hands position on the photo...

...turned into this.

And of course we cheat by using 3D models. Of course the easiest way would be to have 3D models for all characters and do all drawings on top of them. But there is a bad part about that. My experience shows that when you rely much on 3D models in drawing, the characters loose some flexibility or some kind of “creative sparkle”. And it’s not about “uncanny valley” only. Using model clarifies your image, it allows you to make the “right” image, according to “right” rules, “right” perspective, etc. But at the same time it puts your imagination to the limits and that’s bad. Because, you know, the hand-drawn animation takes much of its effect from the exaggeration and the most cool and exciting images come exactly when you breaking some rules. Understanding that is very important and that’s why we tend to use 3D models very carefully.

Currently we started to experiment with the soldier model. The funny thing happened with shot 35 – it’s the shot where the camera makes a long dolly out and all soldiers are thrown into the air. Initially we wanted to use soldier model as a base for drawing keyframes on top. But when we put the model into animation we found that the model looks very naturally as it is.

Considering that it will be masked with some vector elements, effects and dust we decided to use soldiers as pure 3D models in this shot. Of course that saved Nikolay a lot of efforts in the keyframes drawing.

Keyframes marked as to be done with 3D models

That’s everything I wanted to confess about our cheating. ^___^ As usual, you can see our progress for keyframes drawing on the image below. Don’t forget to check the gallery page to see the recent images of this week. We hope you like them. Stay tuned and have a great week!

Keyframes production sheet (08.04.2012)

OK, I hope everyone had a great 1st of April day. And I hope you enjoyed our little joke. I want to assure everyone who cares about the project – we don’t plan to turn everything into “Nazar Style”. Though, the funniest part of this joke is that it wasn’t a pure joke at all – Nazar The Brave character will really look like was shown in my previous post. I hope you enjoy that turn. ^___^

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Keyframes production sheet (25.03.2012)

Here’s one more week passed by. For some reasons this was a kind of hard week.

From one side the non-stop-drawing mode starting to tell – as result of psychological exhausting the process turns into routine and drawings get looking dull and unfacy loosing their creative tune. At the beginning of passed week we have spend a lot of efforts to overcome this aspect, to “refresh” our vision and our minds. Much help in that we got from watching the Gainax artbooks, especially the “Groundworks of Evangelion” – which is like our “Bible”. Watching those works we always get a high impact to recreate our inspiration and get drawings done with a “right” feeling.

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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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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!

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

Shot 51: Artwork by Eleonora Pala

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Here’s some artwork pieces from the past week:

Ivan's Sisters layouts WIP by Varvara Zaharova

Shot 49 artwork by Eleonora Pala