The Sysadminotaur Vault has been unlocked… 3,000 times!

What’s Vault?

Vault is the very first animated short to come out of the Sysadminotaur universe. It’s inspired directly from comic #30 (“Vault”), which quickly became one of the most popular strips in the series. The short premiered on October 31, 2019, making it a perfect closing note to Cybersecurity Awareness Month. While the original comic captured the humor in a few static panels, the animated version took things to an entirely new level with motion, voice acting, and atmosphere. Animator Patrick Désilets led the project, bringing Sysadminotaur to life in traditional 2D animation, complete with rich backgrounds, textures, and lighting that gave it a depth beyond the minimalistic comic style.

Although the final short runs just about a minute, the production journey stretched over nearly two years — not in one continuous sprint, but in bursts of creative effort between other projects. The process of translating Sysadminotaur’s quirky, expressive characters from static panels into full-motion animation proved to be more complex than expected. The characters weren’t originally designed to move around a scene, so Patrick had to rethink proportions, gestures, and even some of the designs to make them animation-ready. On top of that, building believable environments with consistent lighting and textures added a whole new layer of challenge compared to the straightforward style of the comics.

Sound and voice acting were another critical part of the process. John Mondelli and Scott Moat provided voices that gave the characters a new dimension, while Jared Arnold’s sound design added suspense, crowd noise, and just the right amount of exaggeration to land the punchline. It wasn’t enough to simply animate the strip; the whole atmosphere needed to be created to ensure the humor carried over to a video format. In fact, pacing was one of the biggest challenges — a joke that takes seconds to read in a comic can feel drawn out in animation. To address this, Patrick layered in additional visuals and reactions, from background details to crowd scenes, so that the timing felt natural and the humor hit with impact.

To wrap things up, here are a few reflections from the man behind the film, Patrick Désilets.

“This animated project was a turning point for Sysadminotaur. It was technically pretty ambitious for a one-person crew who had other deadlines to meet.

There are many different ways to animate a cartoon (some faster, some fancier) and we decided to go with the traditional method, where each image is hand-drawn (no cutout puppets or computer interpolation), which is very time-consuming. It was mostly drawn on a Wacom tablet, but the approach was straight out of the flipping-pages-over-a-light-table era, except I wasn’t wearing a suit.

What made it a turning point is that this technique demanded more structure: characters needed to be consistent, and environments had to “exist” from every angle. The original aesthetic was (intentionally) more like an indie comic: the drawings were loose and almost wobbly, and the backgrounds were abstract and minimalistic. That sort of reflected the underdog nature of Devolutions as a company at the time. But for an animated cartoon, even if it’s still all 2D, you need everything to “exist” in a 3D space.

So the characters became much more solid after that, but most importantly, the backgrounds went through a major change. For the purposes of the story, we needed the environments to look intimidating. The idea was that the security is impregnable. But our original style lacked that kind of grandiosity.

Finding a direction that conveys that, while still feeling coherent with the cartoony, expressive, imperfect nature of the comics, was one of the big challenges of this project, and it required a lot of trial and error. The resulting combination of exaggerated volumes, sharp angles, and moody lighting ended up influencing everything from website headers to event posters.

The scene where Bob walks across a bright metallic room to the last safe door basically defined the brushed-metal look we now see on so much of our material. We went a little overboard with the textures in the short, and that’s something we’ve pulled back on since, but it does give it a sort of organic weirdness that still feels pretty unique.

The style has kept evolving since: slicker characters, full color, more polish, and this short is what put us on that track. 3,000 views isn’t exactly a viral hit, but the kind words we’ve received (and still get) are what make it a win. So to everyone who watched it: thank you. Not bad for a little project that ended up reshaping our whole visual universe.”