Part 2 – Making a motion comic:

Comics are a unique medium. In the hands of a skilled writer and artist, the story actually resides in an unnameable place between the pictures and the text. You pick up some parts of the information from the words and some parts from the art. The two parts of the brain that handle these chores combine them and you interpret information that isn’t explicitly, solely in either one. This creates an active participation in telling the story. The reader, through these two streams of information combines them into a whole. The storytelling differs greatly from a passive medium, like video or movies, where the information is fed to you in a prescribed manner and the viewer simply takes it in.

The passage of time in a comic is handled differently than in any other medium. The time that passes between panels is random from a moment to years, and the artist and writer have dozens of tools and techniques to alter this time flow, to make you hold on a panel to create a contemplative pause, or to push you through a series of panels at a neck-break pace. Each page can be a design unto itself, and while looking at a panel you are seeing its place in time, with glimpses of the past and the future. The surprises must be timed appropriately, the page turn is the reveal.

For many people who did not grow up reading comics, these things do not come naturally, they can read the words and study the pictures, but that exact balance of the two where the story reveals itself is a learned skill. As we set out to adapt Extremis into a new form, we asked the typical first questions: What do we lose? What can we gain? But also, who is the intended audience? We decided the point of a motion comic is to open the stories and characters up to new audiences who might never pick up a comic book. From that standpoint, we wanted to remain respectful and faithful to the original story and art, but edit and compose the shots as if it were a motion picture. This would be the friendliest form for the widest possible audience. This decision eliminated any approach that utilized word balloons and captions, panel borders, or other techniques that referenced its comic book origins. We also knew that we would have to create sufficient movement with the art to give the cinematic feel we were looking for. This led to two decisions: the various Iron Man armors depicted in the comic would be built in 3D to allow for full motion during the action sequences, and we would have to do lip sync to carry the dialogue heavy sections of the story.

Creating the Iron Man armors and surfacing them to cut with Adi’s artwork was time consuming, but with careful attention to detail it was ultimately achievable. Adi’s art was very consistent from panel to panel, particularly with the armor, and our early R&D showed that this would work well.

The lip sync issues were more difficult. Adi had created fully painted art for Extremis. The skin tones were realistically shaded, without the expanses of solid color expected in a cartoon or more standard comic art. Hand painting all the mouth shapes necessary to lip sync each panel with the exact shading from the comic would not be possible. We ran a quick test, projecting the art onto a 3D head and then rigging and animating it. We created dozens of extra control points to allow us to warp the head into the exact position of the art and re-project it from panel to panel. The test, done in a single day, worked like a charm. We moved on to other issues.

Once we started production on Episode 1, the lip sync technique blew up. The panels we had quickly chosen to do the initial test worked fine, but many other panels looked creepy and the gorgeous painted art only made it seem more unnatural. We completely reworked the 3D heads, wrote software that gave the animators quicker feedback, added another two dozen controls – no one thing was a fix. Some of the lip syncs in Episode 1 were redone 7-8 times. In the end we just muscled through it, and it got incrementally better every day. We have a lot of experience lip syncing cartoony characters, over time we realized that the realistic art needed less enunciation. We also began to recognize the camera angles and expressions in the original art which led to problems and eliminated them in the animatic phase where possible, substituting a similar panel that did not present the problem. There are still several lip syncs in Episode 1 we are unhappy with, just a few in Episode 2, and from 3 on they look pretty good. We had high hopes of taking this technique further, but by the time we wrestled it under control we were too deep into the production to begin introducing new looks.

Moving the still art is really just a matter of willpower; we utilized the puppet tool in After Effects extensively, projected full bodies onto 3D meshs where we had to, built and animated dozens of secondary props like vehicles in 3D, and at times did limited cel animation to make it work. The comic tells you very clearly what is happening and what needs to move. I give full props to the staff from one end of Magnetic Dreams to the other for not ducking any of the challenges and finding a creative way to make it happen every time. I’ve always felt that one of the strong points of our studio is that we have a staff of exceptional problem solvers, and they proved that once again. It got easier as we went, and the solutions more solid as we discovered techniques and our skills with these particular tasks developed.

A lot of people have said that a Motion Comic is really just limited animation with sound design and Voice Over. Before we began, I might have agreed. At this point, we are animating Episode 5, working pre-production on Episode 6, and I have to feel like the end result is looking like something new. The gorgeous work that Adi Granov did on the art is still there just crackling on the screen. Warren Ellis’s edgy story is told without compromise. Where we lost something in the translation, we gained other things through the great sound design and VO done by Edge Studios, Underground Music and NYAV, or the excitement of seeing Iron Man in full animation. We were handed a wonderful comic to adapt, I hope that we did it justice. To Ruwan Jayatilleke, the Producer, if all producers were like you animators wouldn’t be cynical – it was a joy.

Now go buy it so that we can do this again.

Mike Halsey