It was our intention to make use of technology in a way that, without losing the characteristics of the original hand drawings for the film, would help us accelerate and simplify parts of the production that are usually time-consuming and require less creative capabilities, such as the case of masking.
For that, we defined a process that relied on two different plug-ins: G'MIC, a full-featured open-source framework for digital image processing that provides several user interfaces to convert, process and visualize generic image datasets that can be applied to different softwares; and a script that reapplied previous G'MIC filters on every frame of the selected layer.
We started by opening up the animation in Krita, structuring layers like this:
After that, and using a solid brush (Ink-2 fineliner), we mark each frame with two different colours - one for the outline of the character (or other animated elements in the shot that we wish to mask); the other for the empty or white space to be deleted later.
We use G'MICs filter 'Colorize Lineart (Propagation)', a plug-in that detects and fills the marked areas with the same color of the spots, creating a mask automatically. After installing the plug-in, it is accessible in Krita through the 'Filter' menu, by clicking on the option 'Start GMIC-Qt'.
G'MIC filters are only applicable to one frame at a time, which can be very time consuming when dealing with multiple shots, characters and a high number of frames. To go over that, we developed a script that reapplies the last filter used to every frame of a selected layer, and imported it to Krita.
The plug in is publicly available for free use. It can be accessed via the following link: https://github.com/Dimimiha/Reapply-Gmic
After using GMI'C for the first frame, we run the script to apply the same settings to the whole sequence.
If the result doesn't match the image perfectly (which happened more often with highly textured images), we either redo the spots and reapply the filter again, or make some adjustments by hand - whenever the result is closer to what we need.
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