Toon Boom, My First Animation

The Bird Reference

My Bird Design

Background

Clouds

Final Look

So shown above is the first work I've done on the app Toon Boom, a Frame by frame 2D Animation program. The app is similar to that of Photoshop, so it was easy enough for me to get used to. There is always still more to learn from this app but I believe I have covered over the basics. Anyway are first task was to Animate a bird flying. We only had 7 frames to work with and when produced it would loop seamlessly. The first thing we needed to do was to draw over the reference (First image in this blog) This reference planned out the entire animation so it made things a lot easier. When I drawn my Bird I did have my bird character for my animation in mind, so I drawn his face to see if it was simple enough to make on Toon Boon. I did work out so I continued to play with the colour palette.

What my result was is the second image in the slide, I did have a bit of trouble with paint filling the entire image because of small gaps in the drawing lines, but with redraws and using one of the many fill tools I managed to Succeed. Then we were taught how to make a background and how to stretch one frame over multiple frames. (Third image) So I painted in a big rectangle shape a dark purple and dragged it out. But then I wanted to experiment. So on the Main background layer I roughly painted a darker purple circle behind the bird over every frame, and a lighter purple around the edges of every frame. Then to add more to the animation and I want to say, add more motion to the image, I proceeded to make moving clouds. (Fourth image) So what I did there was draw two or three sets of clouds on one frame, then paste them on the next frame, and shrink it, then I would draw two or three more clouds and continue till it loops around. I used the onion tool to make sure I wasn't going 'out of bounds'. After all of that I exported the movie to wmv and made what you see above. However we weren't taught how to adjust frame-rate in Toon Boon so everything is really fast. (25 FPS when it should be at least 13 FPS). So that is something to look forward to the next time.