Tales of Lordran is an animation project by the youtuber Arc Co-Op.
He is mostly a game play youtube focused on the Dark Souls franchise, but he decided he wanted to experiment on the world of animation and make a series of animated shorts telling the stories of the side characters from the franchise.
Since I was already his thumbnail artist and he liked my style, he hired me to make the pilot episode. It still is being developed, but in the meanwhile I was allowed to share the process with others and use it as a portfolio.
Animation
In the current production phase, I am already working on the animation itself in Toom Boom Harmony, including converting the story boards into animatics, making the rough animation, cleaning up and of course putting everything together with light effects on the compositing stage in After Effects.
Compositing
Colored Animation
Animation
Animatic
But of course, this wasn’t the first step, on the rest of this page I’ll show a bit more of the process of creating this animated short.
Design
It all started when he handed me the script and talked about his vision. I started working on the designs of all the things present in this short. Things such as props and the characters from different point of views.
Storyboarding
After having the characters done, I took his script and turned it into a storyboard to have a better idea of the shots that I needed.
Since it is an action packed animation, the characters are constantly moving places and running between them.
To avoid confusion while planning the shots, I made a map of the location the animation is set in and defined the path the character was going to take throughout the short.
Background Art
After having the story boards ready, I had to make the backgrounds so I would be able to animate the characters on top of them.
Most of the backgrounds I created sort of a “safe zone”, which means that there was an area of focus that would be seen in the shot, but around it there is a safety margin that would allow me to make some interesting shots by creating perspective with moving the backgrounds slightly or allowed me to crop them to give more focus on certain elements on the scenes.
With all that said, the project is doing great, I’ll make sure to update this page as more progress is made.