Morevna Project presents
“Pepper & Carrot” is an animated adaptation of a comic
by the French artist David Revoy.
David is the original author of the comic and our team produces the animated version.
Right now we are working on a new episode,
and it is already at the production phase.
I can briefly describe the main steps we go through
to make a comic an animated one.
Firstly, the director makes a draft animation
out of static pictures. Here he defines the duration of each scene
and outlines how characters and other objects are moving in the scene.
The scene drawn by author already implies
some movement in itself. The director has to analyze this movement
and to understand what the author meant by it.
At the same time we record a draft voice soundtrack.
We’re just reading the text aloud here.
Good morning Sir,
I would like eight pumpkin stars, please
Here you are. That's 60 Ko.
Oh dear...
Uhh sorry, I'll have to take only four.
Grrr!
We read aloud and record the words to understand
how much time the dialog will take and get its tempo right.
Simultaneously, we select the music tracks.
So, we create a draft soundtrack and
combine it with the draft visual.
That's what they call an animatic.
It gives us the overall picture
and a general idea of what the animators need to do.
The potion contest
Lucky me, I still have a whole day to prepare!
Let's win this challenge!
During this process we discuss how we could
improve some moments that can be perfectly understandable in the original comic
but need some clarifications when turned into an animation.
So we have the comic, and in fact it has already been directed by the author, right?
The artist drew all of these scenes and arranged them on the page.
However while transforming all this into an animated sequence I see that some of these scenes
need something in between, which will connect the previous scene with the next one.
That’s why sometimes I’m thinking about how to improve the sequence by adding new elements or even whole shots.
For instance, let's look at this scene with Saffron and the coins.
I thought it would be nice to take a close-up
and show her tossing them.
There's no such frame in the original comic, but it connects the scenes
that were there quite well.
When the animatic is ready, we step into the Production phase.
As director of this episode, I have the whole picture in my head
and know how every single scene works. Once all of the scenes are arranged into the animatic, I start assigning the tasks
to the painters and animators.
Every picture has to be cut into parts.
The characters should be separated from the background.
Then we must reconstruct missing parts of the characters or objects,
because when the characters are removed from the background,
we must fill the empty space left behind them.
If a character is meant to move, then some parts of this character
are need to be reconstructed and drawn by us. For example in a static picture the hand of the character
can be hidden behind another object. And if the character is moving the hand
then it must also be drawn by us.
Another common case is blinking. We have to draw
closed eyes, opened eyes and half-opened eyes.
I always try to carefully analyze each scene, and formulate the task so that the artist only has to do what's necessary
because I already know which elements are going to be animated
and which are not. So I just say
this part should be separated and that part should not to be.
This task is done by our painting artists.
My task is to draw the missing parts
and prepare the artwork for animation.
For drawing and editing pictures we use Krita open source software.
I draw any missing details for the characters, the positions of eyes and mouths,
I also draw backgrounds and some other elements.
Once that's all done, the animators will be able to create movement of those artwork pieces.
In some cases we have to redraw some frames of the comic
and the changes can be quite dramatic.
Sometimes we can even change the lighting
or composition of the frame. For instance in the sixth scene...
Uhh sorry, I'll have to take only four.
Grrr!
Greetings, good Sir!
We decided to remove the fruits and vegetables to focus on the characters.
There were too many details and the scene was overloaded.
So we redesigned the composition
and extended the background to take a panoramic shot.
Of course, it was very important to keep the original author's style
and make it fit with all the other drawings.
At the next stage we import all artwork into Blender.
We have to arrange all pieces correctly, put everything in place
and link all the parts to the bones.
This work is done by a rigger.
In this project we have the same person responsible for assembling scenes and rigging.
We use the CoaTools plugin to simplify the process of preparing artwork for animation.
The animators do the final version of movement, what you actually will see on the screen.
The animation is the most time-consuming phase. Here we concentrate on
creating the actual movement. We have to make sure it looks good.
The movement should fulfill the director's idea and fit the tempo
and composition defined in the animatic.
The animator develops the main movement with all necessary details.
If a character is walking then they have to move their legs
arms, shoulders and head. And if they are speaking, they must have
their lips moving and eyes blinking,
The hair and clothes also should move as the character moves.
For animation we use Blender.
Blender is known as a powerful open-source software for creating
3D animation and models. But in this project we use it to create a 2D animated comic.
It fits this purpose quite well.
Especially being used together with the CoaTools plug-in.
There are some more peculiar things in our work.
For example creating special effects with Particle Systems.
There is no point in drawing the smoke when we can create it
using simulation in just two clicks.
We often use particle systems for creating some small effects, like dust on the wind, sparkles, etc.
They look very good and entertaining on backgrounds.
And of course after the animation is finished
there will be a final voicing. We send the final animation to the actors
who will do the professional voicing.
They record the voices, then everything is mixed with the sound effects and music
and then we will have a finished episode.
Our production process is completely transparent.
There is a link in the description of this video, which points to our list of tasks.
You can open it and see what we are currently working on.
You can see precisely who is working on which task.
And see the process of work and discussion in its topic.
For example here we can see a task for animation.
We can see all intermediate versions which are discussed with the director.
And here is the final variant.
Or here is another example - the task for preparing artwork
There we have a task description which explains how to cut this picture.
The artist posts the interim steps of the work
for everybody to be able to see and other team members can discuss it.
The director can make corrections here
or say "everything is great".
At the moment we are working on the third episode. This episode is less complicated than the previous one.
However I think that it will take us
about four months to finish it. We plan to start production of another episode in parallel soon.
And which episode it will be - will be decided by the voting of our sponsors
who support us on Patreon platform.
We will continue showing our process of work in upcoming backstage videos.
Also you can track our progress
by following us on social networks.
See all relevant links in the description of this video.
And that’s all for today! Thank you for watching and see you next time.
Goodbye!