A little over a week ago, we released the official First Look teaser for our series Countdown to Countdown (based off of the webcomic with the same name, but you probably already knew that). If you haven’t already watched the teaser, check it out below! Once you’ve seen it, scroll down to read more on what it took to get to this point - and what we’re working on now.

11 months for 11 seconds

Let’s be honest - the First Look teaser was short. Really short. With just one scene and 11 seconds of video, it might be one of the shortest previews we’ve released yet despite being our first official teaser. So what gives?

To put it simply, it’s a demo of what we think is one of the most challenging aspects of adapting media that wasn’t originally made for animation: the art style. The Countdown to Countdown webcomic (as well as Velinxi’s other work) has a sort of painterly style that’s often more visible in some places and more subtle in others. One of our key goals for the Countdown to Countdown animated series is to both stay true to the original and to bring something new to the table for viewers to enjoy - and that applies to the art style as well.

Building a consistent but unique visual language that both offers familiarity to long-time fans of Velinxi’s webcomic and simultaneously does something new that the comic doesn’t is a challenge we’ve been working to tackle ever since we started working on CTC Animated. What does that mean? Well, it means that our 11-second teaser is the culmination of roughly 11 months of development and experimentation. More accurately, it’s a snapshot of our progress so far - and we released it so all of you can see how far we’ve come. (On that note, thanks for sticking around!)

Let’s talk tech

Here’s a fun fact: our First Look teaser was rendered in 3D - but it’s mostly 2D. Sounds contradictory? I’ll explain.

The role of the 3D software in this case was simply to allow us to prepare surfaces to paint on: in this case, the mirror and the ground. The scene we used in the First Look teaser looks hand-painted, because it is hand-painted. We painted basic textures as usual - and then added shadows and light on top. 3D software normally handles both of those things through an automated lighting engine, but we painted light and shadows manually because it gives us full control over how light behaves in a scene.

We’ll mainly be using this technique for backgrounds and certain props - and we’re still planning on animating characters in 2D. 3D animation works for dynamic backgrounds because it allows us to play around with camera angles without re-drawing intricate scenes over and over, while 2D animation works best for dynamic characters because it gives us complete creative control where re-drawing is advantageous to the overall workflow. Thanks to the software we use (Blender), it’s possible to work with 2D and 3D animation in the same space, which makes this extra convenient for our team and lets us bring in the best of both 2D and 3D animation.

What’s next?

Now that we’ve got the techniques and tools we need, we’ll be working on a few more visual/tech demos while simultaneously expanding on our storyboards/animatics and revising where necessary. This does mean we’re backtracking just a little, but we’re willing to spend a bit more time in pre-production and the earliest stages of production in general because we believe that the best stories need time to grow. After that, it’s full steam ahead for the main part of production.

Oh, and just a quick side-note: the holiday season is coming up fast - so our team will be taking a well-deserved break throughout December and early January. Most if not all of our posts made during December will be scheduled ahead of time as well. If you want to contact us and receive a response before January (response time not guaranteed), please do it before December 21st at the very latest.

Here’s to 2025, and here’s to what’s next!