Antonio Buch writes:
"Hellskate" is a Majestic Lemon project, intended both for a contest and to test our team. Finally, we didn't win the contest but we think that the result is worth to be shared as maybe the first Grease Pencil production - even if it wasn't 100% Grease Pencil though.
The video had to be a 60 seconds long ad for a fantastic film festival. We decided to make a little short as a fake trailer since it let us tell a long story in little fragments.
We mainly used Blender for this production, but as we had a tight deadline and 19 artists were involved during the 2 months of production (in direction, screenplay, storyboard, concept art, animation, color, music, sound...), we ended up using a lot of software actually.
As said, Blender was the cornerstone of the project, starting with the storyboard/animatic, which was made in Grease Pencil too. After the final character design, we made some proxy 3D models for the lead characters, then we made layout files to help the animators with perspective and proportions.
We then followed a quite traditional workflow although we used Grease Pencil: the animators made the rough key animation, then the full rough animation -at 12 fps- and finally the clean-up animation. We weren't a lot convinced about the Grease Pencil filling, so we exported all frames and colored frame by frame in Krita.
As you can see in the quad split above, Grease Pencil wasn't the only animation tool that we used. There were some fully 3D shots as well as a shot with Grease Pencil and Freestyle combined. We also used armatures a couple of times for animating both GP animated and still characters.
As a final note, another Open Source program was used in the production. Natron was used to merge some takes and create the clean plate for this shot:
2 Comments
Great job! It's just non-stop animated insanity, almost like an adult swim vignette.
"- even if it wasn't 100% Grease Pencil though."
I don't think grease pencil projects should every be 100% grease pencil. You're using a platform where you can also mix in 3D content and post-video-editing because they're one-and-the-same application and can seamlessly share knowledge between each other. If people aren't taking advantage of that, they're missing massive creative opportunities.
Very professional!! This could be a TV show!