Eric was a graphic designer for 5 years before attending Algonquin College’s traditional animation program in 2003. Since then he has worked as an animator and animation director on various TV shows, short films and music videos. He met the band Splash ‘N Boots while working in Vancouver and fell in love with their fun and catchy brand of children’s music. They wanted to give Monster Party an animated treatment so Eric collaborated with fellow artists from across Canada through a Facebook group to produce the video.
5 Years
Do you create your animations using Toon Boom Animate Pro only?
The vast majority of the video is done with Toon Boom products. Some of the gang were still using Flash but it was a breeze getting their scenes to play nice within Animate Pro. There’s also green screen video of the band in there too. I was really impressed with how the software handled the footage. I found I could manipulate it as any other drawing element, applying effect modules, 3D transformations and everything! Good stuff.
If not, what other applications are you using?
All said and done we used Photoshop and Sketchbook for designs, Animate Pro, Harmony and Flash for the animation, and Premiere to cut the leica and final assembly. A whole whack of pencils were also consumed in the process.
Why did you choose to combine these products? It was a necessity based on how the project came together. People contributed from totally different setups along the process and I had to adapt to whatever they were using. The band was really supportive of giving the monster sections different styles so it worked out perfectly for us.
Splash ‘N Boots wrote a lot of description into the song so we had a great place to start from. There are two humans and four main monster characters featured in the song that we designed first. A pool of sketches went to the band for selection and then I made a leica to get everyone on the same page. BG’s were painted and cutout rigs were made up of the band for those using Toon Boom. A few of the animators took whole character sections to fleshout, and others helped out by doing some monster dance cycles for the crowd.
The entertaining kind I hope. The style and needs of a project change with every production but Animate Pro keeps rolling with the punches.
When I’m working in studio, it’s usually a mix of cut-out and cintiq-drawn. For this video it was totally open to how each artist worked. This project was my first time using the texture brush and animating a rig made completely out of painted PNG files. Too bad we didn’t include some sock puppet scenes though. Next time.
A free camera
Built in compositing and effects
Wide open file format usage
Texture Brush
A free camera
Versatility. Productions are not limited by the software.
Definitely. I’d used Flash since the old Shockwave days before getting into Toon Boom’s products. Now Animate Pro is my weapon of choice, hands down. There’s a certain familiarity that you can develop with any tool but the potential in Toon Boom far surpasses anything out there.
If we’re talking about end product, probably. You can brute force your way through any software to achieve a certain look. But the limitations of other packages end up causing a lot of cheats and workarounds that are time consuming and simply not necessary. Toon Boom’s workflow eliminates a lot of the running around and is really intuitive and flexible for animators.
I heart it.
I first learned Toon Boom’s Concerto (ancestor of Animate Pro) in 2005 and have grown along with the product line. It wasn’t a hard transition because it meshed well with a traditional animation mindset. I’ve been lucky to work with and learn from studios like Mercury Filmworks, Wild Kratts, 2dLab and Nelvana who all push the software in different ways. There’s a lot of range in how studios implement Toon Boom, which speaks to its versatility.
