Extracts from "How Netflix's 'Klaus' Made 2D Animation Look 3D | Movies Insider"

"...started looking like a pretty impressive 2D film. But then the animators went one step further ...Suddenly the characters looked three-dimensional. But unlike most animated movies these days, the characters in "Klaus" aren't CGI and can't even be considered 3D. It's all just a trick of the light. About 300 people, including 40 animators, worked on the movie "Klaus," which took over two years to make."

"...director Sergio Pablos came up with the idea. Because his story was about the origin of Santa Claus, it appealed to nostalgia. And he thought a nostalgic, 2D animation style like we saw in the '90s Disney films would be a better fit for the story. But he also wanted to advance the look, so his team at SPA Studios in Madrid added a few new crucial steps to the animation process."

Sergio Pablos: "I never looked at 3D as an evolution of 2D. I looked at it as a split, like there's a new way of making animation now."

"Animating the characters and coloring the backgrounds happened simultaneously. The end goal was to have both blend together seamlessly and look like they're part of the same world."

"... they painted the characters with basic flat colors. Here, everything still looks very 2D, but they will soon bring the characters to life with a very important addition usually reserved for 3D animation: lighting."

"...they partnered with a French company called Les Films du Poisson Rouge to help advance the technology, which they called KLaS, short for Klaus Light and Shadow. ...tool allows the artists to paint with light using a number of different types of lighting... like "key light" and "ambient light." With 3D CGI, light is added automatically to objects, but it's trickier with 2D."

"To make the backgrounds pop and appear 3D like the characters, the animators used several different techniques, such as multiplanes, where you have layers on top of layers to give the illusion of depth. The team created a total of 3,160 scenic layouts for the movie."

"...texture. With another tracking tool, they used contour, lighting, and motion to add various effects to specific parts of a character"

"...the animators did use 3D models for some characters and objects and combined the two seamlessly. And even though these were created using CGI, they were lit the same way as the 2D characters were: by hand."

Pablos: "There's things that benefit from being drawn because they feel more organic, and there's, you know, things that are not supposed to look organic. There's things that are supposed to look solid, like wagons and doors and props, and it's really hard to make it feel consistent and solid through drawing."- How Netflix's 'Klaus' Made 2D Animation Look 3D | Movies Insider - YouTube

Part 2. Kamishibai Research

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