The making of Orphanimo!!

From the idea to the finished page...

1. Luc and Ivan conceive the stories. Michael joins in when they get stuck! Sometimes he comes up with funny ideas like Minky on the balloon.
2. All ideas are written down on little cards. While writing a lot of sketches are also made to visualise the several actions and situations. The cards are put into a logical sequence by Ivan, they are the jigsaw pieces of every episode.

3. Ivan uses the cards as a guiding line to make/write the 46 pages of layout or storyboard. The 46 pages of dialogue form a strong base for the final dialogues. (see the red dialogues on the layout-page above).
Ivan sends his work to Michael (see below).

4. Michael makes the clean version of the layout. He draws only the characters and uses paper twice the size comparing to the final format of the cartoon. This allows him to put a lot of detail into his work. He often draws cars too. He likes to do so because he can buy a model on scale of every car he puts into the series. (see the red 'Hummer' and the grey 'Chevy' on the picture above).
Michael first sketches every page using a blue 'non-repro' pencil. When the drawing is OK, he uses a black pencil to draw a clean line over it. The blue lines do no longer appear on the drawing after scanning the pages. What is left are the final black drawings.

After scanning the pages they are burned onto a CD-R or RW and given to Luc.
He also receives the paper version.

5. The 46 pages are copied from the CD-R to the hard disc of the computer.
On a light box every 'character-page' gets another page over it. The light makes it possible to see Michael's drawing through the new page. That helps in putting the background on every strip.
Luc uses the same blue pencil to sketch the background and the same black pencil to make the clean drawings over the blue lines. Every background is also scanned into the computer.

6. In Photoshop (a graphic design program/tool) the two layers, the 'character-page' and the 'background-page', are put in one document. The 'backgroud-page' is made invisible for us not to get confused by the chaos of drawing lines from both layers. First the characters are being colored. They receive 'flat' colours, no shading yet.

7. Here you can see the coloured characters on a line-version of the background. Now the character-layer, together with it's colour-layer, is made invisible in order to put some colour on the background. We also put flat colours, no shading.

8. When both layers are provided with colour they get a set of shading and FX layer added to them (f.i. some lightFX on the candles). These extra layers bring some atmosphere to the drawings.

9. After that we put some lyrics on every page. Under the 'lyrics-layer' adjustable dialog balloons are added. The final dialogues are most of the time similar to the original dialogues on the layouts of Ivan (see 3.). But sometimes modifications or additions are made to serve the image in a better way...

All finished pages are first sent to the editor for correction and, once the corrections are done, burned onto CD-R. The definitive disks are once again sent to the editor for a final check-up and then sent to press.

10. The covers are made the same way as the pages, though even more attention is paid to the atmosphere of the image. Once finished the cover is also burned onto CD-R and sent to the editor that send it to press.

The interior and cover of the episode are printed by different printers (for the Dutch version that is).

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