The Lantern Bearer
A little girl carries her lantern into a dark wood, and the fireflies come to her. Hand-drawn style animation in the manner of the classic studio features.
How it was made
It starts with one character. A model sheet fixed her design from every side: the red hood, the gold button, the round brass lantern. Each shot was then laid out as a pencil rough on animation paper, blue construction lines under the graphite, to settle the composition and the staging before any color.
Each rough was painted into a finished frame in the style of 1940s and 1950s feature animation: inked outlines, flat cel color and watercolor backgrounds. The painted frame became the first frame of its shot. Three animation engines were tested on the opening shot, and the one that held the painted look was used for all three.
The roughs were generated to a story artist’s brief. The same pipeline works from hand-drawn ones.
- Client
- Original short
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Story, Character design, Layouts, Director
- Tools
- GPT Image 2.5, MiniMax H3, Higgsfield
From pencil to paint
Drag across each frame to compare the rough with the finished painting.
