END OF THE LINE - How It All Comes Together

Once a shot is animated, painted, the background is ready, and the masks are complete, it's time to bring everything together.

Each film follows a different process, uses various materials, and thus, the compositing needs vary as well. For this teaser, we focused on three main aspects of the image: texture — to preserve the graphite quality of the original drawings; shadows — to blend the characters with the background and create depth; and uniformity — to ensure visual continuity throughout the teaser.

For texture, we added a constant layer of flickering graphite. A degradé was first hand-drawn on paper and then digitized. Using the G'MIC filter 'Stylize,' we applied the texture to the live-action footage. The plug-in processes the different light values of the video, replacing them with corresponding shades of the graphite degradé. The result is then used as a layer over the painted animation.

Graphite texture for compositing.

The shadows are drawn in Krita, using the live-action footage as reference. These shadows are then added during the compositing process, helping to integrate the character animation more seamlessly with the background and ensuring the shadows reflect those in the actual scene.

Animation frame without shadows

Animation frame with shadows

After adding all the necessary components for the compositing of the shot, the next step is to correct any errors and refine the overall appearance of the image.