Second Internet Workflow

The Second Internet: Animation Workflow Overview

Main Character: Eugene — official character design

Step 1: Designing the Cop Character

Using Kontext’s Flux model within Leonardo, I gave Eugene’s reference art alongside this prompt:

in the style of my reference image create A full-body black-and-white digital line drawing of a frumpy, tired-looking police officer character. The style matches early 2000s digital cartoon animation with clean, minimalistic linework, simple proportions, and slightly exaggerated features. The officer is middle-aged, with a round face, a large nose, and a frown. His posture is slouched. He wears a standard police uniform — short-sleeve button-up shirt with a badge, utility belt, and slightly baggy pants tucked into worn boots. His hair is messy and balding at the top. The expression is bored or mildly annoyed. Keep the line art clean and consistent with a flat, expressive style, similar to a storyboard or Flash animation cell.

It produced a usable reference image, which I traced and refined into a finalized character design using my Wacom tablet:

Official cop character design

Step 2: Generating a Movement Cycle

I gave the artwork to Runway along with this prompt:

3D animated character with smooth, natural movement: his arms gently sway as he nods, his expression shifting from a frown into a smile; wind tousles his hair and his legs shuffle with subtle awkwardness; he slowly rotates, then strikes a dynamic pose and glances over his shoulder.

Runway created a sequence of over 225 frames. I dumped them with a Python script: dumpframes.py.

Then I cherry picked 15 frames that formed a nice sequence without blurring or messed-up linework. They all looked hand drawn with fluid movement — like he was dancing.

Step 3: Building the Park Scene

I needed a park reference behind Eugene, so I used Kontext again with this prompt:

A black-and-white digital line drawing of the character from my reference image rapping in a park. He holds a microphone in one hand, with a slightly slouched, apathetic posture and a blank or tired expression. The park background is minimal and clean—sketchy outlines of trees, a bench, and a trash can drawn with the same thick, expressive brush lines. The linework is crisp and slightly wobbly, with cartoon-style proportions and subtle exaggeration in the face and hands. No color, no shading—just bold outlines and a flat white background, consistent with the simple, expressive style of my reference images.

Step 4: Final Line Drawing of Eugene in the Park

I hand drew a park scene featuring Eugene using my Wacom tablet in Adobe Flash, guided by the references:

Step 5: Scene Expansion

I used Runway’s Alpha Gen-3 Expand tool to generate a full 16:9 park background. Prompt used:

digitally drawn black and white park

Seed: 2922164167

Step 6: Final Composition in Flash

I picked a frame of the cop from the earlier sequence, cut out the white background in BeFunky (Photoshop or Canva would also work), pasted him into Flash as a separate layer, then hand drew background filler to close small white gaps. Here's a video of the process:

Step 7: Final Scene Prompt

Finally, we sent it to Runway for animation. The final prompt was:

Use the characters from the provided image. In the same line-drawn cartoon style and park setting, animate the police officer taking the microphone away from the other character. The character with the glasses reacts with surprise as the cop casually grabs it from his hand.