Into the Magick Woods

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The process
Michał Adamiec

Initially, the project started as a vector illustration. I began working on it by creating a simple isometric scene. Just a forest landscape with a camp and a twist: a monster sitting by it instead of campers. After a chat with Mikolaj, we agreed it would make a great base for an animated pixel art.

Then I began wondering is someone (or something) else living in the forest. So I started working on the next scene.

Then I kept going...

And going...

Deeper into the woods...

In the end, Mikolaj had to stop me from doing more scenes. We decided to stick to 7 scenes, to keep the project reasonable for animating.

Mikołaj Birek

My task was to, basically, turn Michał's awesome vector illustration into a living, breathing pixel art environment, something that would look good in a hypothetical retro video game. The whole process was pretty straight-forward – re-drawing Michał's illustrations in 640x360 sharp pixel art screens. I then proceeded to come up with animations for the scene. I'm pretty obsessed with details, especially animating nature, so I payed attention to trees, rushes, water and so on, so they felt organic and alive.

I wanted to simultanously keep it simple and make it feel alive, so I chose to animate everything in 2-second loops with 12 frames per second (as to maintain the vintage feel of the scene) and then played with shuffling the loops around, so the trees don't all sway on the wind at the same time etc. It was the first time for me to really animate some of the things frame by frame, like fire, water, grass, tentacles and others. I think they look pretty good.

I rendered every screen as a Full HD GIF, so that they could be put together as one, big animated environment. I then decided they would benefit greatly from sound, so I put it all together in one, fly-by animation with rich soundscape and even some simple music at the begining. I'm quite happy how it all came out!