Sunrise Postmortem: Part II (Background Art)

by S.

Sunrise's cutout-style animated intro

As NaNoRenO takes place only over a month, I had to be careful how I portioned my time. I wanted to create painted sprite art, but I also wanted to animate the background art. In order to have both, I adopted a simpler cutout style for the background art. The 2D style allowed me to create background art more quickly, but also allowed me to easily make multiple movable layers that I could then animate or remove, depending on the needs of the current scene.

Overall I went for a retro collage look, because collage is one method of combining flat graphics with highly rendered images. This combination is also the opposite of the typical visual novel, which generally uses simplified character art on highly rendered background art. I was curious how the reverse would work. (NaNoRenO is a nice time to experiment).

Once I settled on the approach, I began with the most intimidating background first. In this case, the plane. All of the -punks are about technology (steampunk, cyberpunk and so on,) and dieselpunk is no exception. To be true to the setting, some form of dieselpunk technology had to be incorporated. Hazel-Bun (one of my collaborators on Sunrise) suggested a plane:

Sunrise: Shiye's Work Room. It has several layers that can be animated or removed.

Whenever approaching a subject I haven't drawn before, I spend some time studying and practicing . Since I hadn't drawn (any?) planes before, I spent some time sketching WWII planes from reference to get the feel for the proportions of a plane. This later helped when creating preliminary sketches for other scenes that used planes (there are three in Sunrise).

Sprites with halftone outline

Integrating with Sprite Art
In order to make the character art look like it belonged on the background art, I created halftone outlines for the characters. Unfortunately, these outlines tended to flash when ATL (Ren'Py's Animation Transformation Language) was applied. I worked around it for some characters, but with some of the sprites that I coded in early on, such as James's, the outline still flashed every time the character spoke. Next time, I would make any outlines part of the character sprite rather than a separate silhouette.

Unfortunately, there was no time to go back and rework background or sprite art, so if I tried something as an experiment (like the halftone outline), I would lose too much time if I went back and fixed it. In my personal work, I might make several variations on any give piece. (I made five variations on the Tell a Demon textbox until I was satisfied—with Sunrise I only had time for two.)