Pascal Gaggelli is an illustrator and graphic designer. The image is his passion, drawn, pictured or in motion. To express his creativity he likes using pencil, brush, a graphic table, a digital camera or a video camera. His area of work covers traditional tools from watercolours to software. Beauty and particular details usually catch his attention. Pascal likes having his digital camera or a sketchbook always with him to quickly keep track of what he sees or touches him. Quality work and keeping deadlines are his goals. Trust and be trusted are his golden pillars for each collaboration.
4 years
Creating comics and animated series’ for the Italian Government.
As of today, yes. Not before. Before discovering Animate I used to work with Flash, being the only program allowing me to create animation with computers at the time.
I create cartoon-style animation.
Hand-drawn and Cut-out techniques. Hand drawn animation is, for sure, more time consuming but gives total freedom in motion, angle and diversity. Nevertheless, the cut-out features in Animate are quite powerful and efficient. This allows me to decrease production time by saving drawings of certain moves such as simple walking or arm motion as well as eye and head movements.
Well I love the Inverse Kinematics feature, it reminds me of the CGI animation approach: in 3D before starting to animate it’s required to build a puppet for a character, so the animator can focus on animation only. With Inverse Kinematics it’s the same. Once the puppet is built, it’s not required to think about animating the whole body, element by element. For example, in a talking scene the whole body will stay still while the mouth will be the only animated element. With Inverse Kinematics, once the puppet is built, animating the whole body of a talking character becomes very easy and quick. It’s as if you have a real puppet in your hand to play around with. By cutting to a minimum the number of character body parts to animate, this accelerates the animation process
What amazes me with Animate is the ability to merge the hand drawn animation with the cut-out animation, thanks to the swap drawing features.
The budget of the animation production will affect the choice between creating a total hand drawn animation or a complete cut-out animation process. With Animate it’s not required to make a decision between these two approaches because it is possible to do both. Using the cut-out animation process, it’s possible to insert several different drawings required for the scene. It’s then possible to decide, during the production process, the number of drawings to add in the animation according the available budget. This provides a great amount of freedom in creating the animation.
For sure! The same scene can be done much quicker with Animate vs. Flash. But most of all, regarding camera moves and controls, in Animate you get what you see while you are building the scene. It means you’re not working in a blind way, sort of guessing what the result might be. In other words: Great control of the final result during the production process.
Then in Flash, previewing the scene is less immediate than Animate because it is required to launch the Flash viewer rather than watching the completed animation directly in the timeline, particularly if embedded movie clips are used.
Not to mention the series of classic features used in Animate which don’t exist in Flash, like the rotation view tool and others.
The freedom Animate provides allows me to be more concentrated on the animation rather than figuring out how to get a specific result. Hierarchy in layers, avoiding creating nested symbols, the rotation view, the light table, the colour palette, the brush options are a few of the tools that help the animator to go straight to what is important: Giving life to a character. It allows the animator to be less focused on the technique and more on the creativity.
According to me, the crucial aspect in animation is to put emotion in the work. Animating is not a matter of only making a character move, but giving him a soul and emotions the audience can relate to. This goes beyond the kind of project or the budget available for it.
Honestly, I don’t think it can be possible to do 100% of what Animate/Animate Pro allows. But it might be possible to do most of it. But the point is: If the process of doing some work is long and painful, for sure it will affect the result. We are talking about art not programming or mathematics. Art brings and causes emotions and if the making of this art is not smooth enough, somehow it will appear in the final result and the audience will probably catch it.
Toon Boom Animate is according to me THE absolute best tool for 2D animation we can find in the market today. No matter what your technique: if you prefer the traditional hand drawn animation way or if you’re more a Flash/website intro animator, Animate should fit to your needs.
The quality/price ratio is, according to me, excellent as well.
For any kind of software, the best way to learn is to practice. For sure, video tutorials have been very helpful as well. Videos mainly helped to show me what it was possible to do with Animate by showing some options or features. The PDF user guide helped me to learn, in-depth, how to use those features by putting in to practice what I learned with the tutorials.
I’m an Apple user and am working on both iMac and MacbookPro.
