Getting the Most Out of Creative Cloud

[Music] [Brad Graeber] Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Powerhouse Animation talk over at Adobe MAX. We're super excited to be here today to talk to you about how we do animation at Powerhouse. We have been using Adobe software ever since the beginning of the studio.

We have played with it a lot. I'm so old that, I used to use Photoshop 2, and I did some graduate work with Macromedia Flash back before it became Adobe Animate. And we've loved working with these tools in a very specific pipeline in Austin. But anyway, let us start off with a few introductions. My name is Brad Graeber, and I'm one of the founders of Powerhouse. Jason, why don't you go? [Jason Williams] Yes. Hello. My name is Jason Williams. I'm a partner here at Powerhouse and the co-COO and Co-Head of Production.

[Shane Minshew] Hi. I'm Shane Minshew. I am also co-COO and Head of Production just like Jason.

All right, let's talk a little bit about the history of the studio because we're pretty unique. So we started an animation studio in 2001. Before that, me and a couple of the founders had all worked at a dotcom doing 2D animation. Most of our background was in feature traditional 2D animation. We worked for companies like Disney and Don Bluth and things like that. And we were doing, 2D animation at a dotcom in Austin, Texas, and unfortunately, that dotcom went the way of all the dotcoms, and we were sitting around wondering what we were going to do. Most of us didn't want to move back to LA or move in the nomadic lifestyle that tends to be part of an animator's existence back then. And so we decided to set some roots in Austin, Texas and start a studio of our own. What we thought we were going to do was continue to work on animated movies. But after we worked on Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights, which we did a fun little scene in a mall for that film.

After we did that, unfortunately, people stopped making 2D animated feature films for a while, and so we had to get creative with what to do inside of the space. So luckily for us, Austin was a really big game studio town. We were surrounded by other video game studios. BioWare was down the street. Sony Online Entertainment was around the corner, and we ended up just going and visiting with those folks and trying to figure out what we could do inside of that space. So we started doing a whole bunch of character design, and cinemas, the little stories that play in between gameplay...

For those games. We worked on things like Epic Mickey. We did about two and a half hours worth of cinemas for that game, and we did a whole bunch of motion comics for Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. And then we started making trailers and all of this other stuff, and it really became a good business for us. So over the years, working in games attracted, and we needed animators who did a lot of action and more realistic animation than, what goes on at most animation studios doing cartoons for kids in the comedy space. And so that created this very unique situation. What happened was all of these older animators that were really into traditional animation, people who worked at Disney and at Fox, started mixing with these younger people who were really into anime and anime adjacent styles of animation? But all, everybody wanted to make amazing stuff. And so it created this studio in Austin that was unlike any studio in the United States. We were doing genre based action animation at a time where almost everything domestically was the family guy or something for preschoolers.

So anyway, that led us to this project that was perfect for the studio. So we ended up getting Castlevania, for Netflix, and we're still working on Castlevania today.

And that opened the door to a whole bunch of other stuff.

At the end of the day, there was a boom in genre-based animation, especially for IPs.

And so being that we were a studio that came up in games and so many of our employees love games, it made a ton of sense for us to do things like Castlevania. And so Castlevania begat a whole bunch of other projects. We actually were working on another show before Castlevania doing development for it called Seis Manos, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. But we also did Blood of Zeus and Kong: Skull Island, and we're currently working on, Tomb Raider. And we're very proud that all those shows have a pretty good following and also great scores on Rotten Tomatoes.

So most of the examples we're going to show today are on this show called Seis Manos. The main reason for that is because it's a show that we created, and so we have more of the rights for stuff to be able to show you guys. But it also is a good way to walk through a project. Seis Manos, it's a unique show. I created it, co-created it with this gentleman, Álvaro Rodríguez. Álvaro wrote Machete, if you're familiar with that film with Danny Trejo. He's Robert Rodriguez's cousin and has done a lot of writing with Robert on a whole bunch of the other stuff that he did. But this was truly a time capsule of the way that Álvaro and I came up.

We were both born in the late '70s, and so we grew up watching, what, a lot of you are probably too young to remember, but UHF TV, which generally was kung fu films, horror movies, and then wrestling. And so we took all of that, put it in a pot, and created the story about a whole bunch of kids who were orphans in Mexico, brought up by a kung fu master, and then get embroiled into a narcocultist's shenanigans played by Danny Trejo. And it was a ton of fun. So it's a throwback to the Shaw Brothers, to blaxploitation films, to '70s horror genre films and all of that other stuff. So most of the examples that Shane are going to walk through when we talk about the pipeline come from this. And if you haven't watched it, the only plug I'll give is please go watch this on Netflix and get those numbers up a little bit. All right. Radical. Thanks, Brad.

I'm going to jump in now that we have learned a little bit about the history of Powerhouse and the show we're going to be looking at for this presentation.

I want to chat about the Powerhouse pipeline and how we use that to create Seis Manos and the rest of our shows. Our production pipeline is separated into multiple phases. The eight phases you see here roughly show the chronological order of an episode's life cycle. That said productions are almost never this cleanly broken apart and almost always have hurdles to deal with at every stage, but identifying these phases is a helpful way for us to show and talk about our pipeline.

The first phase of any production is going to be pre-vis or development.

The first step...

In this stage is all about bringing together the core creative team, melding ideas, and trying to determine the visual language of the show.

In this phase, you can expect a lot of conversations to happen. A lot of director and client conversations where anything and everything from scripts to characters, influences and references, inspirations, and even fight choreography are discussed. Each production is a little bit different, but at the end of this phase, we'll have an understanding of the overall mood and tone and visual styling that we're going for, for the show.

This will serve as the creative foundation guiding the remainder of the production. The pre-vis phase will almost exclusively use Adobe softwares like Photoshop and After Effects to help bring this foundational stage to life.

And here you can see some very early character designs. We've got some story scenes here and mocked up poster. As Brad mentioned before, we were working on development for this show while we were working on Castlevania. We were just doing it in the background, and this was the first attempt at bringing this show to life, but ultimately, this helped get this the show sold.

Another part of the previous stage is major explorations. This is a point when we try to lock down designs for important characters, props, locations, and vehicles.

What you see here is some rough versions some early rough versions of some character designs and some locations. These do change from this phase into the final phase, but it is quite important to get in here and play around with different design styles and shape languages and various aspects of characters and locations.

And then after we narrow down character background design styles the final stage of pre-vis is a proof of concept still. It's what you're seeing here. This is an image that attempts to simulate a screenshot from a currently non-existent show. It combines character art, background, and a bit of compositing love to demonstrate what the show will eventually look like. The goal here is to capture the broad strokes in the visual style and to communicate the mood and tone. This asset will serve as the North Star for the remainder of production, guiding artists towards a cohesive whole.

Now development has some more stages within this, but generally speaking, this will encompass what development is and that brings us into actual show production. Jason's going to walk us through some of our board development processes. Jason. All right. Thank you, Shane.

So yes, as Shane was saying, once we do the, pre-vis and get the style and look of the show, while this is going on, the script is used to being written. Most of the time, an outline is mocked up, during pre-production. Obviously, that's where we get the ideas, settings, characters, and whatnot. But once the scripts are finalized, we will meet with the directors and the rest of the storyboard crew. And this is where the actual visual story of the episode comes to life. So storyboards, typically, what will happen is we'll read the script, the directors will meet with supervisors and crew, and talk about exactly how the episode is going to play out.

There'll be a whole team of artists that work on this. So it has to be a very cohesive story that connects and we have to make sure that the different sequences and shots all line up. So that is all discussed pre-hand, and then the team goes off and starts working on the boards. The boards is broken up into two phases, the rough boards and the clean boards as you can see here on the visual. And they describe pretty much what they say. The rough boards are done very loose, sometimes to the point of just general sketches and thumbnails to get the general idea of the shot, the angle, camera movement, how many characters are in there, just to basically get a loose idea, at this point where we will stitch everything together using Adobe Premiere, which is our editing software that we use to build all of our animatics. So an animatic is just the storyboard timed to the dialogue track, and we will typically throw in some temporary music to allow for the give the final sound design, the idea of the tone of the scene, and then we'll also throw in some sound effects once again just to help out with later sound design. Adobe Premiere is a great program for us to use for this. It's very user-friendly. It accepts our files format in sync. And at this point, the timeline features allow us just to be very fluid with the editing. If the client has any notes, or the pacing isn't working, or we need to cut a scene and stitch one in, we just found that this works best for our production process.

Once the boards are roughed out and we've come to an idea of what the shot and sequence will look like, then we go back and do the clean boards. And the clean boards are just that. We tighten all of the images up. And anytime we can-- The more information we can provide in the clean boards, that just helps later on in the animation process. This allows for much more expressive language in the faces. This helps out our outsource partners. A lot of times we'll even do clean layouts, which is basically the key shot, where sometimes it will act as the main key expression or the key pose for the animation to then go into animation production. So again, once all of that is locked in, we will bring it back into Adobe Premiere, finalize the animatic, and then at that point, we will be ready to have a final version of the story and the episode in full, and we can then go move forward into pre-production, tightening up more character designs and background, which Shane will talk about now.

Thanks, dude. Now that we have a clear understanding of how boards happen within our production process. Once the boards are underway, the background department will begin working on layouts and background paintings. At the top, you'll see some black and white renderings of backgrounds that are called layouts. These will oftentimes get used in the animatic. So during that rough board phase, the board artist will block out where we're going to be within any location. The background artist will then take that information and start to implement these rough layouts, that we will drop into the final clean animatics.

We do try to account for all of the various angles that we can in any location and these angles help provide coverage for each location and each artist, so that everyone knows exactly what this environment will look like no matter where the camera is. After we lock down those black and white layouts, we select a few key backgrounds from each location and those are painted to full color models. We do try to do at least one full color model, like you see at the bottom of this page here for each location. These color models are effectively a drop-in background, and these will show artists that are going to take these paintings down the line exactly how each location should be painted.

When a location features multiple lighting conditions those variations are also accounted for here and we'll do multiple versions to ensure we know what it looks like and what is needed for all lighting scenarios.

Once the boards are finished, the backgrounds are painted, the next step is to move on to color scripts. These are essentially colored storyboard panels and are a powerful means to providing guidance for lighting and shadow, compositing effects, and more for each episode. We'll have pages and pages of these color scripts accounting for each sequence we see within the episode. These are really fun and honestly, it's one of my very favorite parts of production because they provide a genuine first look at how the final product of each episode will look once it's all assembled.

These are one of the most key elements to doing a production, especially when you are working with an outsource partner. These are going to provide a ton of information and again, we have to make sure that every artist whether they are internal or external has all of the same information in terms of all of the various aspects that's going to happen in that sequence, in that shot, and in each episode. All that said, we don't just worry about color and lighting for backgrounds and boards. We also have a specific process we use for character lighting and color. Jason's going to dive into that a little bit more. Yeah. So the lighting design for our shows is a very, very, specific Powerhouse process that we've developed over the course of making all of these shows. This was a bit of a...

Trial by error process, but we've since been able to make this one of our key components to the pipeline. And again, using the softwares in Adobe Suite such as Photoshop and After Effects, we have found this to be incredibly valuable to the look and feel of each show. The lighting design is when we determine the color values for each asset as they appear in the environment, such as, like, nighttime or if there's sunsets or something like that. When determining lighting design, there are two different methodologies that we have been known to employ for each of our shows. This example that we're showing right now is what we call baked lighting design. A baked lighting is more of the conventional of the two methodologies. In this process, an asset default colors are tinted to account for the changes in the lighting condition. So we would build a character's color model, and then depending on what the lighting is, we would go ahead and tint it in this model and then provide color swatches for the outsourcers to use directly so that it stays consistent throughout the scene. And once again, this is typically more conventional. If depending on the style or the general mood of the show, we will use another lighting design, which is called key lighting. Obviously, Seis Manos didn't use this, so we don't have an example, but key lighting is a bit more versatile. And in this method, the outsourced partner only ever receives just the color information of the character's default color. In this process, what we do is once we receive the animation back, we will then use scripts and processes that we formatted using Adobe After Effects, and this allows us to do tons of things like put gradients on the characters, bevels, rim lightings, all kinds of different techniques, and it's been very beneficial. It gives so much more mood to the characters and also just general lighting in general.

But either way, both of these processes were accomplished using scripts in the format that we've established in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. We have set up a template that displays the characters and swatches for each. This allows for very easy and efficient, and we will use this internally and it's also very beneficial for our outsource partners.

Speaking of just staying on the After Effects train here, another big part of our process is using the visual effects. And so when the animatic is done and far enough along the compositing supervisor, they are ready at that point to start planning for any of the special effects that will need to appear in the series. This slide here shows a sampling of what we did in Seis Manos. So as you can see, some of these are pretty elaborate, and again, we're able to achieve these results using all of the different strategies and techniques that we've built into After Effects. These effects can be minor, such as just dust, rain, and glows, all the way to, like, really elaborate story-centric effect.

And though some of our effects are hand drawn by the animators, which is a typical technique sometimes used in 2D animation. We do utilize a vast library of plugins from After Effects. The software has just been such a powerful tool in our post-production and always allows our compositors to have a lot of fun. The options and strategies that are applied in our After Effects pipeline are literally limited to just the compositor's imagination. We've had a lot of fun with this and definitely feel like it's been one of the Powerhouse fingerprints that we like to say on each of our shows.

And speaking of the Powerhouse fingerprint, the post polish that we do in general, once we have prepared our pre-production package for our outsources and receive everything back, we have a whole pipeline built on the post-production. Meaning that, typically, what we receive back from our partners, most of the time in other studios is pretty much...

95% complete. With Powerhouse, we actually prefer it to be maybe around the 70% complete mark because we like to finish the product out using our post-production pipeline. So as soon as they do finish the first pass, that's when all of this kicks into full gear and the Powerhouse uses every technique at our disposal to elevate the quality as high as possible with pretty much everything remaining in our tool set.

It's here where we truly do feel like we've made a name for ourself, as Brad was talking earlier, each of the series and shows that we've worked on have had a slightly different style and slightly different tone to each of the shows.

Seis Manos, as Brad said, it was this tribute to the '70s kung fu scenes and these retro feelings. Obviously, a lot of the colors and themes of Mexico were used, so this had a very specific visual style, excuse me. And as you can see in this sample that this video that we have here up on the slide...

This is showing a pretty standard breakdown of what happens once we receive a scene. You can see the character is laid on top of a background that we created in Photoshop. From there, the flat colors are then...

A masked shadow is applied using After Effects. Then there's a rim lighting along with a secondary lighting that comes in from the side, and then we will put a blended effect. And then lastly, as I was speaking earlier because the show had this very retro feel to it, we would even add in some film grain to make it look aged and just add some additional stylization to the whole piece. So once again, using all of our Adobe Suite softwares in our pipeline, there would have been no way to achieve these results without utilizing all of that. Obviously, we have incredibly talented artists and we have incredibly talented directors that see the visuals and see the final vision, but without the proper tools and software, we are not able to do this. So obviously, very grateful for all of the tools and pipeline that Adobe Suite has allowed us to produce.

This pretty much wraps up our pipeline process. I will toss it back over to Brad to close this out.

All right. Yeah. And just so everybody knows, every project is different. At the end of the day, your job is to take what it is that somebody has created, whether that's a showrunner, a screenwriter, an IP, we've worked on everything from He-Man to, we did a series based on It's a Small World, right, at Disney. Every job is a different...

Creative task, and figuring out how to best tell that is going to be a different journey every single time.

We do have a pretty standard pipeline and how that stuff is executed, but the great thing about working in animation and inside of this industry is that it does allow you to innovate. A lot of the stuff that we have done, and learned to do for Castlevania and all the other shows is stuff that we learned about doing small commercial jobs. We learned so much about After Effects doing motion comics for DC Universe Online. And without having done that project, the Castlevania project would look much different than it does. So always remember what you do every time you use this software. Even if you don't use, some parts of it at one point in time, but you catch something that makes a happier, you could always work that into another project down the road. At the end of the day, there's just an immense amount of things that could be done between the softwares from one to another in a pipeline, and it's something that we've always really enjoyed doing at Powerhouse. I hope everybody had a good time. Good luck out there. And best of luck.

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Online Session

Getting the Most Out of Creative Cloud - OS701

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About the Session

Come and watch the executive and supervising producers of some of your favorite animated streaming series walk through the process of creating animated shows based on their real-life experiences and careers. The team will share the general pipeline and procedures and behind-the-scenes techniques on streaming shows like Castlevania, Tomb Raider, Kong: Skull Island, Masters of the Universe, and more. You’ll learn how modern animation studios use Photoshop, After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Animate to create everything from concept and character designs to final polished compositing.

Technical Level: Advanced

Category: Generative AI

Track: Creativity and Design in Business

Audience: Marketer

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