Thought it might be useful to talk through the conversion process for getting the drawings
into the final cinematic--at least, this is the process that's worked so far in test runs. ;)
PSD, large
I draw most of the artwork--just about everything except for large elements that don't fit
in a frame, and will be displayed as scrolling pieces--at double size, saved as separate
layers in one of multiple PSD files (turns out Photoshop 4 limits you to 100 layers per PSD,
so I'm going through more files than I thought I would ;). The resolution is pretty big, and
looks like this:
Usually the layers in the PSDs aren't complete files, just parts that will be combined
together later in the animation program. This image, for instance, is a combination of 8
layers, which are, from top to bottom:
1) the black bar for subtitles at the bottom
2) the eyelashes
3) the left highlight over the pupil
4) the right highlight over the pupil, (others on the right side of the eye that aren't visible
here, but are used in another shot with this eye)
5) the lower eyelid
6) the pupil
7) the white area just left of the pupil (blocking off a black area used in the aforementioned
other shot)
8) the rest of the face and white background
PSD, small
Except for large scrolling pieces, which are kept saved off in a separate file, once all the art
for a scene or half-scene contained in a PSD file is complete, it gets shrunk down by 50%
along both dimensions. Here's that same 8-layer compilation shrunk down to final cinematic
size:
Captions and subtitles will be added to the smaller PSD. These are only added once we're
at the small size so that the edges of the letters (which are added as unaliased bitmaps)
don't get blurred by the shrinking that happened earlier.
The lettered PSD will be loaded up in the animation program, the large scrolling frames that
I didn't want to shrink will be loaded in with them, and the various layer pieces moved
around, toggled on/off, and so forth, to assemble the frames of the animation. (Oh, and the
animation program has its own, project, format, which the art will reside in for a while as
I'm working out the animation.)
PNG files
Once the animation work is done and all the frames for that sequence are rendering
properly, the frames are all spit out as lossless PNG files. This is really just because I'm
importing them into a different program, which isn't as nice for animating, but has better
export functions for the final cinematic. ;)
GIF files
Each of the frames is converted from its 256-color grayscale lossless PNG format into a GIF
file with a perceptually calculated individual 8-color palette, like so:
For the most part these 8-color frames are pretty much indistinguishable from the 256-color
versions, but they make for much smaller files, which will be important for the cinematic's
download size.
SWF file
The GIF frames are all loaded at once, arranged in their final order. This sequence of 900+
frame images is converted into a single tidy lossless 8-bit SWF file (which actually stores
the frames as PNGs again, only now they each have only 8 colors, so they require much less
file space) which is what you'll see in the cinematic viewer when the update goes Live--we
hope. There is no lossy video codec used, so each frame that hovers in front of your eyes
for 1/10th of a second in the final version will look just as sharp as the one you see above.
