All done! Several hours of work but I crunched through and finished it. I did all the animation in ToonBoom Harmony, and I drew the backgrounds in CLIP Studio Paint. The big changes I made to the scene were redesigning Miss Pineapple, and making the judges look slightly less identical, with different color schemes and by giving the one on the right a mustache. I also went rogue with their facial expressions because I must always do that. Once the finished collab is up I’ll add the link to this post.
A few things I learned on this project, for my own reference:
I finally got the hang of bezier handles, so now I can use the centerline editor tool for brush strokes, and I don’t have to erase and redraw every time I do a wonky stroke. And yes, I didn’t know about the centerline editor at all or else I would have used it ages ago.
In Harmony you can “store” a gradient to preserve its direction for every instance it’s used. That’s what allowed me to have Miss Pineapple’s dress look consistently colored.
The pencil tool is worth taking the time to learn. I didn’t use it here, but I plan to the next time I do clean-up animation. It’s way better than it used to be (me still thinking like it’s 2008 ToonBoom, which had an atrocious pencil tool), and the amount of time it saves down the pipeline, specifically on coloring, is absolutely worth it. You can do textures! I was wondering how Mercury got that look on Hilda, and now I know.
If I had known that I had to toggle on the option to view all four art layers, instead of the two that are visible by default, I would have done that immediately. But I didn’t find out about it until much further into this, so...oh well. ToonBoom still has a bit of a problem with not always making its user interface intuitive. Steep learning curve.
Tracebacks are very useful with volume control. Or, since you’re working with vectors, you can copy and paste the section you want to reuse, and make some minute transformation adjustments to stop it from looking so static. I think Eric Goldberg talks about tracebacks in his book Character Animation Crash Course.
If at all possible, I want to avoid designing a character with an edge, because my god those gingerbread edges drove me nuts. I’m never going to deliberately put myself in that position again, unless I have to draw Spongebob. I’ll make an exception for that.
SO this is the cookie carnival shot with finished cleanup. I did this all with the brush tool but dear god it took forever. I keep hearing people say to use the pencil tool instead, so whatever the next thing I cleanup is, I’ll try that. I just need to color this and I’m home free!
I wanted to animatic this audio from A Bug’s Life, but with Wilson standing in for Flik. For this clip, I need Wilson to be talking to a small child. I thought one of the non-human child characters would work better, so I have to decide between Webber, Wilba, or Wurt. Any thoughts on which one?
When I began this (2014) I would have been embarrassed about acknowledging Starlight Express on my main blog, but now I realize there’s literally no point feeling that way. Starlight Express is corny but I still enjoy it. I revisited this project a couple times (there’s some newer drawings toward the end), but I have other things on my mind right now. Sorry it ends before the actual song gets going!
it’s been a couple of years, but I may still want to give this another pass. I’d change Hunter’s design, for one. But this is the basic blocking I imagined for the first part of the song. It’s one of their best, and I think it has to be sufficiently dramatic, or there’s little point.
Not a fan of The Dear Hunter? Why not, where have you been?
god, I’ve been thinking about doing a Razia’s Shadow animatic forever, but it’s been 5 years since I made this first pass and I haven’t gotten back to it. The “spiders’s” design is so goofy. Even so, I keep revisiting this song. Maybe I’ll give it another pass, but who knows.
