Major Grom: The Game

We participated in the new film Major Grom: The Game, based on the popular comic book universe about police major Igor Grom from Bubble Comics.

The real villain of the movie is revealed only at the very end. In the climactic monologue, he connects all the dots of his insidious plan into a coherent picture. We visualized this monologue by the hand of the villain himself.

“Insane” pipeline

The movie's main antagonist, Sergei Razumovsky, suffers from a personality disorder. His good half is an altruistic entrepreneur, his evil half is a black-winged demon whose indiscretions get Sergei locked up in a mental institution. To emphasize the character of the second part, we created a rough and expressive image, as if it was made by a person who has never learned to draw — Sergei himself.

Concept art

We wanted to combine the “clarity” of the design and composition with the “messy” style of the drawing itself. Our style was influenced by many sources of inspiration, from outsider art movement to the palette of Edvard Munch. All lines should appear scratched out, sharp and fast — nothing smooth, colors — bright, acidic. We took a “clean” base — a composition from an animatic or a character design — and muddied it in HEAVYPAINT app.

Character design

When designing the characters, we had to keep in mind that our scene is part of a blockbuster movie for a broad audience, which means the designs need to be understandable and engaging for most people.

They shouldn't look too cartoonish or unnecessarily crude. At the same time, the characters should have clear and understandable anatomy so that animators can work with them. While trying on the “madness” style, we made several approaches based on keyframes of the animatic - that's how we gradually widened the library of poses and emotions.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are 3D models with animated textures. We didn't have time to color the backgrounds the same way we colored the characters, but we still needed the environment to look like it was being colored frame by frame. Therefore, we used camera projections and took several different color frames for each location. This way we could adjust the frequency of background “boiling” in After Effects.

Heavypaint

Usually the last step in 2d animation is cleanup. In our case we were to make the animation look dirtier.The main tool we used for this was HEAVYPAINT, a painting app developed by Vaughan Ling. Besides the expressive brushes, the special thing about HEAVYPAINT is that it is not an animation program, you can't flip frames to make sure objects have a consistent shape. it played to our advantage as there was no temptation to make each frame similar to the previous one, all frames were made from scratch.