How to turn a Zombie web series in 2011 into adult Comedy
We’re going to review this series in 3 aspects: Character Design and production, Background Design, and 3D animation, so I reached out to the animator supervisor of this hilarious web series from Mexico, Ramón Baturoni who has been working as a traditional (and digital) 2D animator for many years.
He was working with Anima Studios in Mexico producing “El Chavo” (a kid’s cartoon from the Chespirito shows in Mexico) when the opportunity called on his door to become the director of animation for “I am a Zombie”.
Podcast de la entrevista en Español:
Romi Villamil is another great artist from these web series. She was kind enough to reach Ramón in order for us to bring this amazing interview for all of you. I sincerely appreciate her help in this process.
It is amazing that we can share a bit of the experience from these two artists of what the production of “Soy un Zombi” was like during the golden age of YouTube.
Ramón, could you tell us a bit about your experience and how you got into the “Soy un Zombi” project, please?
It was a great experience. A good friend with whom I had worked at Ánima Estudios for many years invited me to participate. In fact, almost everyone on the team had worked at Ánima before. The story of “I am a Zombie” seemed very interesting to me and it gave us the opportunity to create something with the parameters of production, animation, and content that we would have liked to implement in previous projects, now everything depended on us and that was very striking, I think the result was very good.
How long did it take to complete 1 single chapter fully voiced and animated?
I estimate that we produced around 20 or 25 chapters in total. We developed one complete episode every two weeks. Each episode lasted 3 to 4 minutes.
Writers and animators will join in a meeting and brainstorm ideas. If it made us laugh and had good dynamics with the rest of the characters, we knew it will work in animation. From there we would record the first voice pass in half a day. Then the real voice actors will come and add more personality to their lines. We would have the sketches ready for production in a day or two.
From your experience as a producer and animator, what was the biggest challenge of “Soy un Zombi” at a technical level?
I think one of the challenges was to have a very streamed production method to optimize the number of episodes we were going to produce. We designed an animation process that all animators would follow to achieve homogeneity in the scenes.
For me, it is very important that the characters feel alive, with all that this implies, even if the animation is limited, the characters should feel they have weight, and that they respond to gravity. The action reading should be clear. The viewer should relate to them and stop thinking that they are drawings on the screen.
We created some Flash files specifically for those characters, and I worked with the animators so that we all followed the same steps to achieve consistent animation.
For example, I have a particular way to do traditional animation for lipsync, so I trained all the animators to follow the same guidelines and avoid “mouth popping” when working with voice animation for their characters.
What was the most satisfying experience during production?
I could highlight the way in which we made the scripts, especially at the beginning of the series, we would gather at a small table in the garden, with our breakfast or coffee or whatever we wanted to start the day. Then, we would set the general theme for the episode and we would start playing with ideas back and forth, just like a casual chat between friends. Sometimes we did not stop laughing at the absurd ideas that we came up with.
By the end of the meeting we chose the gags that we thought were the funniest, although we didn’t have a defined story, they were just isolated jokes; we gave them a structure to be able to go from point A to point B in the story.
The intention was not to give a message or a moral, just to create something fun. And somehow a chapter gave us ideas to do the next one. Even Fans and haters started to react to these stories every week, and we thought “this sticks to the wall, let’s keep throwing more”, so we picked up themes like “presidential voting”, “conspiracy theories from the fans”, “Mexico folklore” among other things until the series got canceled
During production, the work environment was very delightful, full of jokes, and good talks, but always keeping the line of professionalism. We respected each other.
Could you tell us a bit about how you started the process of creating a rigged character?
The original drawing and designs were produced by Julian Ban Bores, an excellent artist.
Each new character was created and tailored to the need of the story episode script.
Then we would use FLASH to create a Rig design that was applied to all the characters.
Flash creates 2D assets using “Symbols”. We embedded some pre-planned symbols with synchronized animation to be able to handle each independent detailed movement like the hands or eyes.
In the end, everything worked very well choreographed to those pre-defined, pre-animated symbols. This allowed us to save a lot of time because the preset values that we gave in each level of the embedded symbols in the rig, could be repeated or manipulated without affecting another part of the animation.
What was it like working with more animators for this project? Did they handle filenames or controls in any way that would identify the settings or characters?
We started with 3 animators, Roberto Jaimes, Julian Ban Bores, and myself, so each one named their files as they wanted as long as they indicated to which scene and sequence they belonged.
We coordinated things together since we were all in the same office room. The only thing that was done outside that room was the voice acting, but the recording studio was across the yard in the studio building property lot.
How did you handle transferring projects from one workstation to the next? How did you organize your pipeline to have an EPISODE ready and approved?
Since we were a small team, we had a server where we uploaded the scenes and it was enough to turn our seats around and say to Manu (who was in charge of the assembly and editing) “Hey Manu, I already uploaded scene X, you may start the compositing and post effects”.
This was the same workflow when I completed the storyboard and the animatic for that week’s episode. I will take a couple of days sketching with the first draft audio, then I would upload it to the server once the director approved it or made adjustments to it.
How long did it take you back then to develop a 2D character complete with faces, hands, and poses, ready to animate?
Not much, since we had the system that I told you about, Julian traced everything in vectors and in groups and what each animator did was just select which groups would be inside each symbol, distribute them in layers, assign pivots and it could be animated, the new pieces were traced, cleaned up and colored on the fly.
We knew exactly how we wanted them to look and to be composed. For example, we animated a lot of movement without changing the character’s body or skull except for the arms which were fully animated with new pieces that the animator created for that sequence.
In terms of audio, how did you do to synchronize the animation? How did you receive the final audio?
Yes, while the designs were being finished, if they were required, the voices were done against the animatic, in that case, the voices were done by Wereber tomorrow and his crew and on many occasions, we did the voices ourselves, I did several voices too, the one that most I enjoyed was the drunk Santa Claus.
It was animated against the audio so that the lipsync was correct, I worked very closely with the animators so that the lipsync also had the same parameters.
How do you see the development of animation after 2020 and the pandemic? Has the social factor and distance in the stories influenced something? Maybe the working methods?
Yes, everything changed, in some things for the better and others were a bit more complicated, but today we have production systems that have allowed greater contact with artists from all over the world. On the one hand, there is more competition, but also more opportunity and learning; Very interesting projects that I probably wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. Due to the initial chaos of the pandemic, we had to look elsewhere and today, fortunately, very interesting proposals and very profitable challenges are emerging.
Name an animation production that inspires you: What productions would you say are making a change for the better in animation?
I think that in my case the most representative reference in 2d animation was the “Klaus” movie, I see it as the resurgence of an expressive, fun, and content animation, Sergio Pablos’ work is an important reference. There are also many interesting and varied visual and content proposals, as well as the production process
Thanks for your time! As a farewell, is there any advice for future 2D/3D animators in the industry?
Well, the advice is just not to stop studying, the animator should not stop observing his environment to be able to represent it as best as possible regardless of how stylized the design or content is, he should always leave the viewer with something that he can relate to his reality even if the product is very fanciful, grotesque or anatomical, you always have to study.
Thank you so much.
Background design and Layout
Romy Villamil is the artist that created the backgrounds for the “I’m a Zombie” series. She also worked with the script and animators to define the look and feel of the episodes.
Which software did you use to create your backgrounds, Romy?
Everything was created with Photoshop, Illustrator, and sometimes Flash back in the day.
These are some of the backgrounds that I designed for the series. We would plan between 6 or 7 backgrounds per episode, at the most. Ideally, we were using 4 or 5 at a time. Doing more backgrounds would require more time and the production deadline would have been difficult to complete.
What was your favorite moment of working on the series?
My favorite moment from working on the series was when we did the September 15th episode, where Peña and Peje try to explain to Calderón the origin of Mexico’s independence day.
It was very funny because we had no script, absolutely nothing, and I proposed to the scriptwriter “what if they ask the characters, but they have no idea what to say and they make up stupid things to answer?” They greenlit the idea, and by lunchtime, we started creating the wacky dialogue, all inconsistent with the real story, mixing things from the dark force, the empire, and enemies with references to Star Wars between other gags. The crew loved the jokes.
Another favorite moment that I remember was when we made the hashtag “it’s Peña’s fault” because we also created it out of absurd things so the characters would blame the Zombi world president for everything wrong. We also wrote this one without a previous script, everything was written on the spot and it ended up being a hilarious episode because we all did it together. We just sat down, started talking nonsense, and it came out very original and funny.
What would be your advice for artists who do Background Layout and Design?
First: Composition. Learn composition, observe real life and draw it. Master perspective and do not be afraid to create backgrounds. These are very important skills.
I see that cartoonists or illustrators are generally terrified of drawing scene layouts or scene locations with architecture.
I would recommend that you do not use Clip Studio paint just because it already includes some backgrounds that they have in the libraries. Those assets are predefined 3D models for houses or buildings, then they trace them or use render effects to put them into their own comics. That’s not being a background designer.
I feel that background artists can do much more to create scenes. There are people who use Sketchup as a basis for certain structures in the background composition. Software is just a tool. If an artist relies solely on those pre-built model libraries, then they become lazy, and performance for designing and laying out backgrounds starts to drop.
Using the software is not bad, but my advice is not to be confined to a single program but to investigate, study the structure, and draw the shape of the house or building structures by hand using architectural drawing. You need to hand-craft scenes to understand depth, perspective, and values. Practice makes perfect.
3D in a 2D-vector-zombie-world
Moisés Cano collaborated with Romy in making the 3D objects for “I am a Zombie”, and we wanted to know more details about the making of the series.
How long did it take to create the entire object library?
The time it took to make the entire library of 3D objects for the series was approximately 4 months since they had to be modeled according to the style of the drawing and they had to be reused for various scenes without counting that they had to be textured. and some even cheer
Did you import the 3D into After Effects or Flash?
I would rendered the 3D object as an image sequence or still, and later it would be placed in png with transparency in After Effects
What was the part that most motivated you to create/build the assets for “I’m a Zombie”? (what did you like to do more?)
Actually, I liked to do everything because I have always wanted to dedicate myself to making animation and modeling 3D objects and I think it was a very nice experience in itself since it gave me the opportunity to carry out a modeling style which I had no experience with.
Thank you very much for this interview!
Animation School
Ramon Baturoni specializes in traditional and digital animation. You may find more information about his training in ARTINSIDE animation and model drawing classes:
https://www.facebook.com/ArtinsideMexico
COCO SCHOOL
Traditional animation
Networks:
Personal
https://www.facebook.com/ramonbaturoni/
Fan Page
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100062870183519
https://www.instagram.com/ramonbaturoni/
Recreating the Zombie rig head in Blender
Before the world Pandemic in 2020, I was already working in the zombie character head.
Since the world situation was alarming, I deemed not to publish the rig (or the 2021 interview) at the time. But now that we’ve passed those emergencies, I am glad to present this zombie rig head as a fan art of the series.
-Pierre
If you are a PATREON the completed animated (and voice file) is already available for you. Rigging cartoon characters in Blender’s Grease Pencil is something I really enjoy. I want to share more of my personal workflow and rig setup for this kind of animation through Patreon videos as well as on my Youtube Channel.
Let me know what you think of the “I am a Zombie” web series or the Grease Pencil rigging features in Blender in the comment section below. Thank you!
-Pierre.
