a) To help visualise the project before we begin writing it and developing it further.
b) To test out a new 2.5D animation pipeline (that we call the Qorian worflow) that will allow us to acheive this efficiently.
Qorian Workflow:
This is a workflow devised by Nqobizitha Mlilo for the production of "Project Tsika". Essentialy born out of two needs, If we attempt to create a feature length film that we will shoot and apply Vfx on, we face the hurdle of having a shortage of actors who can pull it off. We would also face the limitation of only being able to shoot in HD. If we attempt to produce a fully 3D animated feature/long form product, all consumers would compare it with stuff they have seen like Shrek or Incredible. 2D animation offers us the advantage of not needing actors as well as faster rendering times... but we don't have as many illustrators as a Japanese studio would have... so the Qorian Workflow sits in the middle of 3D and 2D.
Combining the flexibility of 3D and using cel shading techniques, we can produce 2D results. The initial character set up for that is time consuming, yes, but once the character is set up, one can then pose and render out stills which is similar to drawing/scanning and coloring. Once you have this artwork you can animate it in 2D (in our case, a combination of 2D animation apps and mainly a custom rig built in a compositing app. This affords the pipeline fast illustrative capabilities as well as fast rendering as well as Higher res rendering (like 2K).
The Qorian document is being developed now and the trailer above is the first production created using the Qorian workflow. We will be creating another trailer, using better and more hand painted background plates this week. The trailer above only took one compitent artist 3 hours to produce once the character was designed, built and rigged. More tests will be shown on this blog in the upcoming weeks.
Comments are more than welcome to help us trouble shoot this pipeline and hopefully provide a workflow that will produce feature length animations in Afrika.
