Been swamped! Quick Update!

My twin sister/business partner, Catherine Satrun, and I have been very busy with work lately. To keep up with work demands, we have upgraded to Toon Boom Harmony and are very excited to explore all the possibilities! For anyone unfamiliar with this software, it is the highest end animation software available for hand drawn and "Flash" style animation. The new tools are mind blowing. I love it! I can't wait to dive in and do some "puppet" animation. We have done a bit of it at work, but not home for our personal projects yet.

I would like to share two work examples which I used this software. In the bird animation, I did the final line work on these. Doing cleanup and final lines directly onto a Cinitq in Harmony provides the best quality possible. In this age of giant HD television screens, it is essential for the commercial business. This is what clients want these days. I still prefer animation to be hand drawn, but when it needs to be cleaned up, it's best to work in the computer. When hand drawn final lines are scanned, the program vectorizes them and can interpret them oddly, not giving the best quality. If there is time in the schedule, usually those lines often have to be touched up after it is scanned, especially in the area around the eyes.

The second example shows an end product shot Catherine and I did for a rush job. The client decided last minute to have animation in the end shot, and also needed a new product illustration. We were hired on to do it in ten days. These characters have never been animated before, as far as we know, and we also had to create the model sheets. Then there were acting/animation revisions as well, trying to figure out how these characters would behave. (We did hire help to get final lines done on paper for us to scan.) I am going to write up a whole blog post on the process of creating this shot. When most people hear three seconds of animation, they naturally think it would only take a day or two. For hand drawn animation, this is most definitely not the case! Most of the animation was done on "ones," but we ran out of time and a tiny bit of it was on "twos." I'm super swamped with work at the moment, but will scan in my roughs and get examples together for a new blog post as soon as I can. (Whenever I have a free evening.... some day soon, I hope!)

Edit: The follow up post is HERE.