Animating Comics

In the last few years, Cut The Mustard has taken on a number of projects on behalf of comic artists who have found themselves with diminished engagement as social media platforms continue direct attention away from stills and towards video content.

Comic artists are not the wealthiest demographic in society (let alone animators) so every penny counts when it comes to their marketing spend, let alone any spend. That's why making original animation based on their work is often out of the question for us, even if it's just a few seconds. While many have found primitive solutions to adapt their work into video using apps and utilities like CapCut, it's often not the most engaging.

To help make small budgets go further, we've offered an unconventional solution - taking existing art, cutting out essential elements and using simple animation techniques and basic sound design to bring them to life. This is extremely cost effective and can often be turned around in less than a working day.

Say Hey Simon's 'Enemy' Comic - Sound Design by Simon

Where we have made these 'comic conversions' we've always made the best effort to be faithful to the art and work exclusively with what is in the frame, only creating new assets when necessary and always being careful to maintain the artist's style faithfully.

The usual process starts by taking the art into photoshop and preparing it for animation. Depending on whether or not the art is layered, we'll separate characters and elements like speech-bubbles and text from the background, extend backgrounds and create additional assets. Tools like content aware fill and clone stamp are very handy for this process, but sometimes nothing can beat the brush.

The final piece will usually be put together in After Effects where we'll typically crack out Rubberhose 3's Puppet Pin tool to get some basic character animation, pre-comping things like mouths and eyes with the main body to these can be played with as well. Recently acquiring Moho also gives us more dynamic solutions with their Smart Bones tools when it comes to more complicated movements but low budgets often mean that this is not something we wheel out often for this purpose.

Sometimes artists opt to do their own sound design but it's something we certainly enjoy putting together ourselves. Even better is when we're offered to opportunity to do character voices ourselves. I particularly enjoyed lending my voice to these excellent Clarice Tudor comics we animated for Rewriting Earth.

Clarice Tudor's 'Fur Imports' - Sound Design by CTM

Clarice Tudor's 'Trophy Hunters' - Sound Design by CTM

I particularly liked War & Pea's solution to voice overs, using text to speech software and sending over the clips to be timed out to animation.

War and Pea's 'Good Feeling' - Sound Design by CTM

'Good Feeling' remains the second most viewed War and Peas reel on Instagram.

War and Pea's 'Great Success' - Sound Design by CTM

One of the more extraordinary conversion jobs we've been given is this A-Ha and Rewriting Earth collaboration. Different techniques, similar principles.

A-Ha x Rewriting Extinction, illustrated by Mike Perkins

We're very grateful to all the comic artists who have come to us with their work! If you'd like to see about having your comic's given the treatment, hit us up.