Can you talk a bit about the choice of the style of the project, which looks like cel-shaded CG-animation?
As we set out to adapt the book, there was just no question that we were going to do our best to adapt Dave Gibbons’ style into animation: His style is known for a lot of hatch lines on it, and that was something that we didn’t wanted to strip away, but that’s what you do in 2D. Generally you’re subtracting lines, you’re not adding them. So, the challenge was, how can we keep those lines?
We did explore 2D originally, and we tried some in-house testing with those “Gibbons lines,” as we called them. We also talked to some 2D animation studios, but ultimately we came to the conclusion that doing it in a 2D medium would just not work out well for us. We felt it would be much too difficult within our time constraints to do beautiful smooth animation on all of those amazing Gibbons lines. 3D animation became the best option to create texture maps of those lines and keep even the texture of the comic-book page as Dave would pull those lines. We wanted the ragged edge to those inclines, and that that’s something that’s difficult to capture in 2D; but in 3D we can map those textures onto 3D figures and preserve those comic-book textures that we wanted to preserve in the experience.
