The review session on Friday left me feeling a little bit better about my animation. Despite there being many clips shown that I found incredible, mine was still well generally recieved. I did want to implement the feedback I got more thoroughly, but between work and the interim Informed Practice film we have to make I simply don’t have enough time over the holiday. I decided to focus on compositing and familiarizing myself with the node view in Harmony as I am very interested in exploring compositing further.
I began with shading and highlighting my characters as well as applying textures, and I used several different methods of doing so for each character. I began with the rabbit character.
As the base color was already a bright almost-white, I opted for only shading. I created a new brush using the paper texture function to make it a screentone, created a new drawing layer where I manually painted the shadows on each drawing, and used that layer as a matte for the tone node connected to my character layer. I also made sure to turn off anti-aliasing on the layers for this character. This gave it the pixelated, hard edge, flipnote studio look I wanted for the rabbit.
Next I worked on the fox and man for a character that does basically nothing in my animation, boy did I spend way to much time trying to figure out some things for him.
I created offset shadows and highlights using peg transformations, following a guide from ToonBoom. That way I didn’t have to manually draw the shading in for every drawing. Then I wanted to create a blur on the line art, which in theory, should not have been hard (I mean, look at the nodes, there’s TWO). However it took me several different configurations, about an hour of googling and half an essay of an email drafted to Jess and Mariana, before I realized that the connection output port linking to the lineart blur was simply not connected to the overall composite outside the group. I was proud to have figured it out on my own but WOW did I waste time. Like my highschool computer science class all over again.
For the big bird-like character I just added a texture matte and some textured shadows.
It was getting late and I was determined to finish the whole animation that night.
Finally I went back to the sloth and edited all the lines to either be fully gone, or just made them smaller, to give more of a lineless effect.
I also went back through each character duplicating certain body parts and rearranging the layer order as I had animated everything on one layer, but certain bits had to be behind the table while others had to be in front. In future I should animate all of these in isolation. I think it would also help to have all the lip-sync on a different layer just parented to the head, so I have an easier time making bigger changes.
Then I exported the video making sure the layering of the tables and other props was correct, in order to put some final touches on in After Effects.
After this the spring break began and as I was out of town (shoutout Antwerp and Dublin), I did not continue to work until we finished the second elective. I used this very interesting guide by Manu Mercurial to add some little effects to tie the whole thing together. His tutorial was very comprehensive, relying on exporting every little layer separately. I unfortunately didn’t organize my ToonBoom file well enough to be able to do this efficiently so I didn’t go into as much detail with the edits.
In summary I added 1 ligh mask in the first scene for integration, a wiggle effect during the last scene, atmosphertic particles, and a bloom effect. I didn’t want to go too crazy with the edits as I wanted it to feel natural but not hyper-realistic. I really enjoyed compositing and I would definitely like to explore it in more detail in future.
Finally, I exported and uploaded to YouTube, as seen below.