It's important. Trust us.

When we first started animation on "Wolf", we were pretty much feeling our way blind. Everyone did everything however they felt like it. I think the only people who had any sort of guidelines at all were the background folks, and their instructions were to "make it bigger than HD". That of course includes everything from 2000 x 2000px to painting on the Great Wall of China.

We've come a long way. Now if you join the staff, your first assignment will be to read the process document -- sounds like big scary weasel words, but it's really just a matter of how big, what format, and what timing. Our animators can still use whatever tools they like -- so long as their finished frames come land in our storage at the proper dimension and file format. Our inkers can ink without trying to clean up after the animators. And our colorists can just color -- they don't have to seek out all the little open spots where the fill keeps leaking out ;)

And most importantly, when the frames are composited, they just "happen". Suddenly you have an animated scene. It's there, it moves, and everything's where the animators wanted it to be to start with.

Processes are good. Plans are good.

We're taking questions for a video interview. A number of us will be together next weekend and we're taking the opportunity to answer some questions. Just post your questions here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7097

I love technology that makes my life easier.

When it comes to animating, anything that speeds up the process without sacrificing quality is a good thing! I just started using DigiCel Flipbook again for the first time since college. It turns out you can draw straight in and then see the progression of your animation. This is great news for me, as my time for Wolf is very limited. If I can save time having to capture or scan or anything, then WOOT! It feels like Photoshop's brushes so it's very familiar to me.
I've been testing things out with Bernard as my model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8YkGZP1v20
Coming out pretty nice! I'll need to buy the program to rid myself of that pesky watermark. Then I can also ink and color. Coloring in FlipBook is SO EASY! The fill tool is really thorough and there are all kinds of shortcuts and ways to adapt it to make it even more efficient (like coloring the same area of a character over multiple frames). Color me satisfied!

For more info on DigiCel, see their site: www.digicel.net

Scene 7, shot 9.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd4lhlZ2vAI

Some work with effects here, both hand-drawn (the shading) and digital (Luna's sparkles). The sparkle effect isn't finalized; we'll probably decide on that very close to the end, but this is probably pretty close.

On the production art page. Of course. http://wolfmovie.com/art/production.php

Just some selections from the scenes we've been working on.