Production Report #7: Style and technique

Let me start this production report by sharing the status chart indicating our progress of the upcoming episode.

At the chart you can see the key stage of our production – “Screenplay”, “Animatic”, “Artwork”, etc. If you compare this chart with the production plan that we had a few years ago for Morevna Project Demo, then you can notice one thing – this time we don’t have a “Vectorization” stage. So, what’s about it?

Vectorization – is a process when you take a bitmap artwork as reference and reproduce it using vector lines and fills. A simple example of vectorization can be found in this post.

The vectorized artwork have several benefits comparing to bitmap artwork: it can be scaled without quality loss and makes possible to create “morphing” animation by deforming lines. Also, vectorization gives some additional control on the final look – it is possible to easily change colors, line width, line style, etc. Here you can see a sample video illustrating the vectorization process.

On the other hand, vectorized artwork also have some disadvantages. As you can see from the video above, vectorization is a very demanding task in terms of human time and skill, so in the past we even asked our community to help us with this stage.

Another disadvantage is related to personal perception and thus is harder to explain. The thing is that vectorization doesn’t work for good for artwork with high level of detalization. The lines will look more accurate and crisp (which is definitely an advantage for some style), but the artwork might loose the “natural feel”, it won’t look “alive”.

That’s why for the new episode we initially made choice to go without vectorization. In the current production we are coloring the original artwork by hand and using it as is. As a consequence, we are sticking to cut-out animation technique, with some elements of frame-by frame animation.

In my next report I am going to elaborate on how our coloring process is organized. Stay tuned!

This production report is sponsored by 19 patrons giving monthly pledges through our Patreon page. Special thanks to Christopher Covington who have joined us as a new patron this month!

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