n today’s world we are surrounded by 3D CGI films and traditional 2D animation has become a niche style, a lost art/craft of sorts. It has become harder for 2D animation to catch up with these trends and the scales of storytelling done by 3D animated films. It is a common practice to use both 3D and 2D technique in animated films and shows, but usually the characters are 2D and the environment is 3D or vice versa. Spider-Man into the spider verse was the first film to break this barrier and pushed the envelope as to what the medium could achieve. For example, although the characters were 3D models, their expressions were all 2D hand drawn frame-by-frame. The Netflix film pushed it even further.
Klaus – synopsis
When Jesper stands out as the postal academy’s worst student, he is assigned to a frigid island beyond the Arctic Circle, where feuding people seldom exchange words, let alone mail. Jesper is about to give up when he meets Klaus, a strange carpenter who lives alone in a cabin filled of homemade toys, and finds an ally in a local teacher. These odd alliances bring joy back to Smeerensburg, building a new tradition of kind neighbours, mystical legend, and stockings carefully hung by the chimney. This demonstrates how a little act of generosity always inspires another, even in a freezing, distant land, much as when Jesper met toymaker Klaus, their presents dissolve an age-old animosity and deliver a sleigh full of seasonal traditions.
Behind the scenes
When the animation process for “Klaus” began, it looked like an impressive 2D film. But then the animators went one step further to create a film that looked like this. Suddenly the characters looked three-dimensional. But unlike most animated movies these days, the characters in “Klaus” aren’t CGI and can’t even be considered 3D. It’s all just a trick of the light.
About 300 people, including 40 animators, worked on the movie “Klaus,” which took over two years to make. And it was completed under the wire, just one month before it premiered on Netflix. So, why did it take so many people and so much time? To understand, we have to dial back to 2010, to when director Sergio Pablos came up with the idea. Because his story was about the origin of Santa Claus, it appealed to nostalgia. And he thought a nostalgic, 2D animation style like we saw in the ’90s Disney films would be a better fit for the story. But he also wanted to advance the look so his team at SPA Studios in Madrid added a few new crucial steps to the animation process.
“I never looked at 3D as an evolution of 2D. I looked at it as a split, like there’s a new way of making animation now.” As claimed by by Sergio Pablos
First, they storyboarded the script and made an animatic using temporary voices for the characters. They swapped these out later once the real cast was recorded. The next step was layout, where the team designed backgrounds and figured out the placement of the cameras. Animating the characters and coloring the backgrounds happened simultaneously. The characters were all hand drawn using digital tablets and a program called Harmony by Toon Boom. The animators used live-action reference videos of themselves as a guide. The initial sketches were very rough, but there was a cleanup stage in which artists refined the drawings with crisp, bold lines. Then they painted the characters with basic flat colors. While everything still looked very 2D, an important addition bought the characters to life with a very important addition usually reserved for 3D animation: lighting.
They partnered with a French company called Les Films du Poisson Rouge to help advance the technology, which they called KLaS, short for Klaus Light and Shadow. Poisson Rouge was able to make the tool much more efficient and easier for the artists to work with. The KLaS tool allows the artists to paint with light using a num ber of different types of lighting in various combinations, like “key light” and “ambient light.” With 3D CGI, light is added automatically to objects, but it’s trickier with 2D.
According to Pablos; the lines, with drawings, the computer needs a certain level of AI to even understand that this line corresponds to this line and this hand is also this hand. KLaS tracks movement of the characters so the light and shadows will move with it. The program takes a very educated guess, but it’s not 100% accurate, so the artists can go in and fine-tune it by hand. Painting with light allowed the artists to get creative with details down to the tiniest reflections in their eyes. The team used lighting not only to make the characters feel more real, but also to help tell the story.
For example, when Jesper is handing out papers to the kids like a drug dealer, he’s always standing in the dark to illustrate his shady behavior. And when he’s exposed at the end of the film by his father, he’s the only one standing in the light, while the others are in the dark.
Inspiration for detailed lighting techniques came from movies and TV shows, like using just a sliver of light to illuminate a character similar to “Apocalypse Now.” It’s important that the backgrounds also look three-dimensional and follow the same lighting pattern as the characters, so they used “color keys” as a guide.
The team created a total of 3,160 scenic layouts for the movie. After they’d merged the characters with the backgrounds, they used a second major step that really gave the 3D characters that intricate detail to bring them to life: texture.
With another tracking tool, they used contour, lighting, and motion to add various effects to specific parts of a character. In the end, the characters looked much more 3D and like a part of their environment, as opposed to looking like stickers on top of an elaborate painting.
But it’s really a combination of the light and the texture that makes that illusion and sells the effect. While the majority of the film followed the 2D process, the animators did use 3D models for some characters and objects and combined the two seamlessly. And even though these were created using CGI, they were lit the same way as the 2D characters were: by hand.
The whole process seems very daunting but quite enjoyable as well, as so much experimentation went into making the characters and backgrounds Avant Grande and this is whole purpose of art to keep reinventing itself. The look, feel and scope alone of the film affirmed my decision to become an animator and create stories for every generation to remember.
References
Snyder, C. (2020). How Netflix’s Oscar-nominated ‘Klaus’ made 2D animation look 3D. [online] Insider. Available at: https://www.insider.com/how-netflixs-klaus-made-2d-animation-look-3d-2020-1.
Toon Boom Animation. (2019). Sergio Pablos on the creative process behind Netflix’s Klaus. [online] Available at: https://www.toonboom.com/sergio-pablos-on-the-creative-process-behind-netflixs-klaus.
Brewer, J. (2019). How Netflix’s Klaus is bringing hand drawn 2D animation back to the big screen this Christmas. [online] http://www.itsnicethat.com. Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/sergio-pablos-klaus-netflix-animation-201119.
Arsalan Awais 