Cartoon "Gypsy": A card inside out

Well, judging by the comments and feedback about our first greeting video card about the Gypsy, we can assume that the majority liked it. I think many would be interested to get behind the scenes and see with my own eyes how this short cartoon was made. Welcome!


After the idea and the script were ready, the work began to be conducted in several directions at once:
1. main stage - storyboard
2. character preparation for animation
3. drawing color sketches for which you need to navigate when rendering and compositing
4. important stage - the sound.


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In fact, the scheme that was developed at the beginning of the project “Gypsy” was tested.

Storyboard and animatic.



They began to make a storyboard by defining a clear number of plans in the video: there were seven of them. Then it was necessary to determine the composition and duration of the plans. The result was a sketchy cartoon on paper, which then smoothly turned into a video.

Sketches and backlinks.



In parallel with the storyboard, sketches of locations and backgrounds were drawn. In principle, three locations are involved in the video: this is the location of the gypsy, where it goes to the village, the location of death coming out of the forest, and the location where the gypsy and death appear together in the frame.

Oddly enough, but most of the time was occupied by the work on the sketch for the first plan. He received sufficient changes until he satisfied all our needs. With the rest it was much easier: they turned out literally the first time.




Animation
Needless to say that working on the cartoon was both difficult and interesting at the same time? :) The first difficulty was the interaction of the characters with each other.



The keys of the animation must coincide in time, otherwise there will be no clear interaction, and the characters will move independently from each other. For the most accurate results, a video was shot from this scene. (In the frame, everyone is absolutely sober!)


It was without exaggeration the most complex plan in the video.
After drunken Gojo and Death, things went more fun! The work was interesting, first of all, because in its process new methods of working with fabric were tested, allowing to achieve the desired result more quickly. Also refined and improved control system of facial expressions of the character.

Fabric simulation.
After several tests, it turned out that the clothes of the characters also take a lot of headaches. Any combination of parameters did not produce acceptable and predictable results. The problems were mainly expressed in simply unprecedentedly long delays, and the quality left much to be desired. If one rag behaved still bearable, then at the interaction of several objects a real nightmare began - the clothes were simply torn to pieces. After several hours of torment, it became clear that the problem could not be solved head on.

To solve a large complex problem, it is necessary to break it into smaller components, as we were taught in school. Divide and conquer, so to speak. Proceeding from this, we isolated all problem areas, broke into pieces and simulated separately. So, let's say, the gypsy had a separate miscalculation of the shirt, separately - vests. Death, when viewed from a certain point of view, is just one big piece of cloth. Here I had to cut it alive ... First, the sleeves were cut off, then the bottom of the robe (conventionally, the “skirt”). We received three separate parts: the sleeves, the “skirt” and the remaining upper part. The upper part was also divided into sections: directly the torso and the hood (it was not necessary to cut them specifically: we simply painted the areas where we will use the simulation, and where not). Now, the speed of work and its interactivity have skyrocketed. After the director approved the resulting animation in a cut and “gutted” form, this whole mess was collected in voidino, so that no seams and cuts could be seen. The already dressed “dressed” doll was further edited by hand to eliminate the remaining glitches and, of course, to add the final touches of the director. Well, in the final, the final cache was baked for the final scene. At the same time all the garbage that had accumulated during the production process was thrown away.
Done! Scene football our visualizer!

Render and compositing.
It would have been all over. It remains only to click on the magic button "Render", and it's done. At least it seemed so at first. The most basic and, perhaps, the most difficult task was to achieve the maximum similarity between the three-dimensional image and the two-dimensional image that the painter painted. Yes, not an easy task. I had to be cunning with lighting, shaders in 3D and color correction in the composite.



But, in fact, in programs for compositing, not only color correction is done, because the combination is a good half of the work on image visualization. It is in the composite that all the effects are made, in our case it was snow, fog, all the backdrops and much more. The ability to use normal maps helped a lot, making it possible to change the lighting on an already rendered image. This saved a lot of time, because every time you move the light source you don’t have to go into the 3D editor. This technology was used to animate the highlights from the salute on our heroes in the last party.


Voice acting
Well, the sound. The music, of course, turned out to be credited thanks to the group “Zdob si Zdub” and to our sound engineer Ivan Slivke. That was the case. One evening, three delegates from our company, stocked up with pies and wine and went to visit the Zdub. In the studio, naturally. Labor until midnight gave its fruits.


Roman Yagupov (the soloist of “Zdub”) laid out in full: he made unimaginable sounds, danced, gave out fantastic themes on the move, improvised. By the way, Roma knows gypsy and is well acquainted with gypsy culture. So he was just to catch the mood of the cartoon. Zduby are unpredictable and super-professional musicians. So it turned out that the guitarist played the violin, the bassist - on the double bass, and the soloist - on the drums and drymbe. All the instruments and the voice were recorded, and something had to be done about it. Here the sound engineer took over. To heighten the enrichment of the sound and to underscore the mood in some scenes, brass and accordion were required. VST tools coped with this role on "5". As for ambience, long live sound libraries! All mixed and augmented music was thoroughly “licked” and mounted to the video. Cartoon came to life!

And the warmth is the most important thing - on April 1, for the studio’s birthday, we are releasing another postcard with Grandfather Baro and grandson Tagar.
The site of the cartoon "Gypsy"