So I've been trying to figure out what kind of pipeline to establish to get Hurricane Vendetta going as an animation. The last time I made a long animation, I used some archaic digital tools. I wasn't going to subject myself to animating in Photoshop again. I needed to figure out what tools would help me create web-cartoon level animation that looked good, but made the animation process smooth and easy.
First, I had to figure out which program was going to make storyboarding easy. I don't have my ipad to do storyboarding anymore, so I looked into options that can work on my Surface.
Storyboarder
This program is lightweight, free, and easy to use. Storyboarder was good enough to test out some scratch audio with imagery. (See: Speech Test) It's not half bad to get something quick and dirty out. But if I wanted to make scenes longer than a minute with more camera work, I'd have to level up.
Storyboard Pro
Toom Boom Storyboard Pro is a little more complicated than Storyboarder, but in my opinion the juice is worth the squeeze. Storyboard Pro gives me the option to board more than a minute worth of artwork at a time. Even better, I can import image sequences from Storyboarder, so I can work with something more light weight when I'm on the go. Storyboard Pro is a fairly powerful boarding program that I think is going to be the main workhorse for creating storyboards to be turned into final animation.
It's figuring out these tiny bits of the pipeline that gets me to how I want to create this animation. Storyboard, Animation Program, Background art, all are different parts of the creation process. (Also, I get help from my partner as he's also working on his own animation research and development.) Once I get the best process ironed out, all that's left is the execution.
So let's talk final Animation Art.
TV Paint
TV Paint gets the job done. As far as animating straight ahead goes, I can throw down new frames to animate quickly and easily. And I got the artwork clean up to not look too bad. I think I might use this software for animating more intense sequences. I'll let you know after I've done more testing.
Toon Boom Harmony
I got the idea to try out Toon Boom Harmony from my friend Fable Siegel, the animation director for Lackadaisy. They recommended I try out this program as it's worked out pretty well for their pipeline. So I start throwing together animation artwork into this program. I add the character art drawn natively in the program as well as a hand drawn watercolor background. I dig the style of the artwork, feeling sloppy and indie while also giving us a feel for island life. As long as I kept the line weights steady, I felt like my artwork translated well enough to Harmony for animation. But how did animation itself work out?
Harmony Animation
I decided to take Harmony for a spin in terms of regular animation (just in case I wanted to do a sick ass opening animation). It's not half bad. I just have to figure out how to add key frames faster. I'm still learning. I feel like this program could create some very clean line work mixed with robust animation. I may not want to get this deep for animation for every shot, but this could come in handy for more "bigger budget" scenes or "character acting. Here's a little sample of how Harmony rough animation looks. (I should have a more cleaned up version of this in the coming weeks.
Okay that's all, folks. I can't wait to show you guys more!
-Love, Joolz