Dragon, choose cultural victory to make money

Chapter 161 The birth of great works is always accompanied by difficulties
Regarding the images of Tom and Jerry, the protagonists of Tom and Jerry, Drogo chose the style of the versions from the late 40s to early 60s.

This is also the style that is most familiar to most people who grew up watching this animation.

Because the time span is more than 80 years, the entire series has undergone many evolutions in style.

At the beginning, the style was closer to animals, with obvious hair effects on the bodies. It was only a few years later that it changed to a more simple style.

This is the most well-known generation.

In the following years, Tom's image became a bit like an old man, more sinister, and the overall plot became a bit darker. The episodes about childhood shadows basically came from this period.

In a later period of time, it suddenly turned into a Q version. Perhaps many people have not seen this version.

And because of the more commercial production updates, the quality has seriously declined.

So after the new millennium, Warner, which is famous for holding a lot of top IPs but not making good use of them, adjusted the style back to the most classic version.

But the production standards are no longer up to the level they once were.

The decline of 2D animation is a common phenomenon, not just American animation. The level of sophistication of Japanese 2D animation is also far less than that of the last century.

The fundamental reason is that 2D animation requires a large number of intensive labor by painters, which will become more and more expensive as labor costs increase. From a commercial perspective, it is not cost-effective.

The good news is, Drogo has no shortage of men.

It is Drogo's duty to restore the glory of cat and mouse.

He has decided to complete the animation without any upper limit on the cost. First of all, as the de facto monopoly of video media, he is confident that he can make back any cost.

After the animation, there will be peripheral products, and after the peripheral products, there will be games. He always thinks that it will be absolutely fun for Cat and Mouse to release a game similar to "It Takes Two".

The second, more crucial reason is that Drogo himself wants to watch it.

In the Wrangler Theatre, the tall curtain wall on the stage projected a storyboard of the Flying Cats and the three characters that will appear in this episode.

The image setting of Tom, Jerry, and the yellow bird.

Painted by Drogo himself.

The setting draft also includes the character's movements and expressions.

The main difficulty in designing these lively expressions is that if Drogo draws them according to the templates in his memory, his artistic level is barely enough.

However, what he didn't expect was that after showing the settings and storyboards, the reactions of the artists did not seem to be good or bad.

But a sense of strangeness.

It's like curiosity mixed with misunderstanding.

"What's wrong? What's that expression on your face? Is the painting not good?" Drogo asked.

"Uh, that's a bit strange. Is this a painting of a cat and a mouse?" an artist asked tentatively.

"Isn't it similar?"

The painters all shook their heads.

"And shouldn't a cat have five fingers on its front paws? There are only four here, and four on its hind paws." The painter just now continued to point out the doubts.

The others nodded.

Drogo covered his face with his right claw helplessly, having forgotten that although they were all comic artists, their current comics were closer to Hong Kong comics.

It’s not that the plot is as abstract as Hong Kong comics.

It refers to the painting style, which is more realistic. I have never seen such a highly generalized painting style as Tom and Jerry.

“You can think of it as a simpler, more childlike way of drawing. Think about it, when children first start drawing for fun, do they extract obvious features and blur details like this?

"We should draw our animations like this too. It will be much more efficient and it will also be cute, right? Do you understand?" said Drogo.

The world needs cute things.

"I understand."

The painters’ responses were as unconfident as students answering questions from their math teacher.

“Will you do it?”

"meeting."

Then when I was taking the test, I couldn’t perform the solution immediately, so I wrote a solution to show my respect.

It seems that before the official production begins, Drogo needs to produce some drawings first, so that the artists can learn the style for a while. "Then why is it that after this Tom cat was cut by the clothesline, he was fine in the next frame?" Someone pointed at the storyboard and asked.

Because funny characters are invincible.

Drogo really wanted to answer like this, but if he didn't let them understand this creative idea, subsequent creations would also be problems.

"In artistic creation, you can give up some authenticity for the sake of effect," Drogo explained.

"Look at the movie 'Fire Boy King', where dragons and tigers play with yo-yos, is that realistic?"

Before he finished speaking, the painters had already nodded in affirmation.

Yes, he created the yo-yo illusion.

"Then you can watch "Construct Warriors"..."

This doesn't work either, the construct has also been made.

Oh no, after all this fuss, it turns out that Feilin’s comics are all realistic.

"How about this, you treat Tom and Jerry as a comedy, each scene is a little joke, although the protagonists of each joke are the same, they are not completely continuous."

The painters reluctantly accepted this explanation.

As the world's first animation, in addition to technical issues, the concepts are also brand new and everything has to be explored from scratch.

Drogo then began to introduce the entire production process.

In his plan, the Flying Cat episode will be produced by all the painters together, and it will be positioned as a teaching concept in the game to let everyone learn how to make animations.

Subsequently, nearly 500 painters were divided into four groups to produce four different episodes at the same time, which could roughly ensure the frequency of monthly updates.

It is an animation that can definitely withstand replays and is replayed endlessly on days when there are no updates.

The production cycle of one episode is 4 months, but it is not easy.

Each episode is about 7 minutes long, excluding the 6 and a half minutes in the opening, nearly 400 seconds.

In order to ensure smoothness, the common one-by-two or one-by-three shooting in animation is not used, that is, one picture lasts for two to three frames, but one picture is one frame, with 24 frames per second.

Such an episode would require nearly 10,000 paintings.

If there are multiple dynamic characters in the same painting, they must be drawn on multiple pictures to avoid one character being drawn incorrectly and the entire picture being unusable, and then having to stack them together.

So there are actually more pictures to be drawn.

And there's no cel here, the transparent synthetic plastic often used in animation to distinguish between characters and background layers.

You can't rely on materials science. Drogo prefers to call it scientific alchemy. Whether or not you can produce results depends 30% on your ability and 97% on luck.

But he has Redstone Shadow, which can deduct characters.

Who would have thought that pure hand-drawing and post-production could appear in the same project.

"From here, to here," Drogo pointed to two frames on the storyboard, showing Tom carrying a ladder to the bird's nest, and then the ladder and the cat were burned black, "5 seconds of footage, 120 frames, not a single frame can be lost."

This segment will serve as a test to see if the animation production plan can work.

40 days later, a 5-second uncolored animation was submitted to Drogo.

The first 20 days were spent learning the painting style, and the next 20 days were spent producing it. This is already the 6th version produced.

The previous five versions all felt wrong. The animations looked simple, but when they were actually produced, there were either inconsistent styles or the movements were weak, and there were always various problems.

Animators who have just changed their careers have been tortured to the point of being a little crazy.

Drogo plays this 6th edition.

The movements, the expressions, the ladder burning, the falling.

There seems to be no problem.

But Drogo still felt that the effect was not as good. What was wrong?

No color?
The impact shouldn't be that big.

Sound effects?

Sound effects have also been added. Drogo Studios already has a lot of experience in sound effects production, so there are no problems with the performance.

Oh, yes, music!
How can Tom and Jerry be complete without a soundtrack?
(End of this chapter)