The Backgrounds Are Almost Done!!

There is still a small handful of background left to be worked on. Some I'll have to draw from scratch and some I just need to make some tweaks to an existing background for a new shot. Either way, the final has become a lot more colorful since the end of the fall semester. I have a lot of fun coloring the backgrounds and I'm pleased with the progress I've made over the months.

I had been pulling a lot of inspiration from the background illustrations for the anime film, 5 Centimeters Per Second by Makoto Shinkai. The movie is gorgeously realized with astounding artwork. Definitely look it up if you want to be pulled into a breath-taking visual experience.

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The Background Coloring Process

I've spent a lot of time focusing on the backgrounds lately. I guess I want to get a good chunk of them done before winter break. One thing that I have to think about when I'm coloring these backgrounds of the bedroom is that some of these drawings are seen more than once in the film and at different times of the day. This bedroom shot for example is seen at sunrise and at night.
In this post, I'll give a little insight onto my process for coloring these backgrounds.

Morning Lighting

Night Lighting

First I scan my layout drawing into photoshop at 300 dpi. Because I am atrociously slow and doing linework in photoshop, I like to do all my clean line drawing right there on the layout.

In order to refine the lines a little more, adjust the levels settings. This controls what photoshop determines is true white and what is true dark. This helps eliminate some ghosts of erased lines and any paper textures that seeped in through the scan.

Now that the drawing is all pretty and clean. It's ready for coloring. But first.....

Before I touch my drawing with any color, I need to set the layer compositing mode. I'm using Linear Burn for this drawing because I need the lines to be able to show through the flat color. Compositing modes such as Linear Burn, Color Burn, and Multiply drop the lights from an image (in this case, the white parts of the drawing) and leaves the dark lines in full view. This way, I just create new layers to color on underneath the line drawing layer.

Flat color the drawing. To me, this is actually the most time consuming part of the coloring process just because I'm always messing around with my color choices.

Gradient time! I love drawing with gradients. With the exception of a few touches here and there with the bruch tool, this whole room was rendered with different gradients. Sometimes that means selecting an object, creating a new layer, applying a few gradients to that selection, and changing the compositing mode of the gradient layer just for the shadows alone. There are also gradients for highlights, reflected lights, and cast shadows.

If I were to set all the compositing modes on the layers back to normal, this is what the background would look like. The reason that I shade with value tones like grays and blacks instead of colors is because if I change my mind about a certain color, I can just change the flat color layer and leave the shading layers alone.

Now that all the colors and values are in place, it's ready to see a little sunshine. This shot is first views in the beginning of the film during sunrise, so it needs a pinky-orange cast to it. By laying a peach colored gradient leading away from the window and setting the compositing mode to Overlay, I get a warm morning glow. A few orange sunbeams are dropped in too.

It's a similar process for the nighttime shot. But instead of just a gradient on half the screen, it's a full fill color dropped right over the whole drawing and then setting the compositing mode to Hard Light.

Once the character animations are added in with After Effects, I'll also made a few more lighting changes to the backgrounds. I'll be applying this process to several more backgrounds in the upcoming weeks so I better get my coffeemaker up and running!

What if I Told You That I flat Colored This With a Mouse?

Heh, I forgot my tablet this weekend.

Background Layouts Complete! Another Checkpoint Reached!

Awesome Possum! I finished my background layouts for the whole film. There are still some background images that need to be drawn like the stock views of the city and some other things but all the layouts pertaining to animation are done!

To no one's surprise, it's 4 in the morning and I am all tuckered out. Time for bed. Hmmm, i'm getting a strange sense of dejavu. Wait a minute, does this picture seem familiar?

Oh yeah, that's because the same thing happened with my last film from junior year.

Me after finishing the layouts for Enviosity in 2009

Layouts hit the 2 Minute Mark

Where most layouts end, mine keep going. The first two minutes of the film have all their respective layouts complete. I've been having a lot of fun drawing these layouts, especially more detailed ones like the shot below. I'll keep chugging along and crankin' these bad boys out as fast as I can because I need to get started on coloring them for backgrounds as well as beginning the key animation.

Layout drawing from Shot 37

Animatic Update, New Story Boards and Layouts

I spent the weekend tweaking my animatic to death. I had some layouts done so I thought I'd throw those in there too. You may have notice that the climax of the film has changed a bit. After some discussion with my mentor, I decided that giving her the choice to join the circus and then forcing her to join anyways was kind of pointless. So in this version, there is no choice. The witch shows her the contract and then works her evil magic. I was also happy to key out a few of the shots. With every update, I feel a lot better about my film.

Bakery Layouts

Here's a sample of the new batch of layouts for the bakery in Macey's Windmill. There's a few more to do so I felt the need to stop by one of my favorite cafes to grab a bag of "inspiration"... ^^ Yummy, yummy inspiration!

Whoa boy, doesn't that pecan roll look good!! =D

Starting the Layout Drawings!

Just a few of the layouts that I had been working on over the summer. I know that I'm going to have to make a few more story boarding tweaks to the second half of the film but the first bit is pretty set in stone so I got crackin' right away. Now I can finally scan them because the scanner I have at home wasn't quite substantial enough for these.