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Goal

Once the story is nailed down, we want to animate some drawings in Adobe AfterEffects, match up the drawings with the dialogue and add some musical accents. You want to use vector drawings (as opposed to bitmaps) because they resize well, keeping their smooth edges. Because there are so many steps, if you don't figure out a system and maintain some orderliness, a big mess ensues.

Drawing

From what I can tell, it is still common practice to work out the drawings by hand, rather than to try to do them directly on a computer. So...

> Aim for a strong pose

> Minimize cross-hatching and hairy lines

> Ink in the drawing and erase all pencil lines.

Scanning

Goal: scan into Photoshop as cleanly as possible

> Setting: Black and white -- 1 bit  (not grayscale, not color)

> Resolution: 600 dpi -- nice and big

Adobe Photoshop

Goal: Clean up the scanned bitmap for vectorizing

> Eraser tool: Clean up any stray marks.

> Moving part anticipation. Because I am Illustrator-challenged, I try to make sure that any part I want to animate consists of a nice closed line, with no other lines touching it. Use the eraser to remove a few pixels to free up the part from any adjacent lines.

Adobe Streamline

This is a nifty little program with the sole purpose of converting bitmaps to vectors.

> Open the Photoshop file in Streamline.

> Settings: Options> Settings. Preset: "Inked Drawings."

> Convert the file: File > Convert. Presto.

> Smoothing: Edit > Smooth Paths... will allow you to simplify the lines a bit. Experiment. The simpler the better, without losing shape definition.

> Copy: CTL-A to select all points. Copy and paste or drag the converted bitmap into Illustrator.

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Cosmopolitan Productions | Cosmo Resource Page | Mad in Pursuit  | Contact