Skills Showcases.

Once I finished the storyboard, I could start on the actual animation. I got Toon Boom Harmony open and I started animating. I started by just drawing the characters, different mouths for lip syncing, and the rigs. For the first scene with Ash running, I grabbed the already made rig from my previous WalkTalkRun animation, as well as the background from it. once i had every character, pose, and drawing substitution that i needed drawn, i started drawing the backgrounds. for the dark blue background, I took a lot of inspiration from the classic animation memes found all over youtube. for the parts with Ash in actual forest scenes, I wanted to make it look eerie and unsettling, so I gave it a color palette with a lot of really dark browns and greens, with accents of dark blue.

once i got all the characters and backgrounds drawn, i started to work on the actual animation. I started simple, with just adding the correct timing to correspond with the music playing in the background, then adding keyframes to get the different camera moves animated, especially for the simpler scenes with more flat animation. after that, i started to animate the rigged cut-out from the beginning scene, making it appear as if he’s speeding through the forest. once i had finished that, i went to the scenes with Ash shapeshifring back and forth between his true form and pretending to be Coffi, and animated the shapeshifting using the drawing substitutions made earlier on in the correct timing. i did the same thing with different drawing substitutions made to animate Ash’s head tilt/ear fold scene with the correct timing. for the mirror scene, all I had to do at this point was change the drawing substitution for the eyes to go from the sad eyes to the echausted eyes when he says the word “ugh”. next, i added the star transition to each of the scenes that keep the same background but have different positioning in the scene,  in order to make the animation look more seamless. then, i animated Ash grabbing the unnamed pig characters phone and dropping it. 

After finishing all of the major animation, I had to animate the lip syncing. one of the main challenges of this part was the fact that I couldnt use the already recorded song in the animation, due to the fact that that instrumentals in the background prevent Toon Boom Harmony’s auto lip sync feature from working properly. I ended up finding a solution by simply recording myself singing the song with around the same tone and timing as the real thing, and seperating the lyrics into different sound layers in Toon Boom so that it wouldn’t automatically animate the lip syncing too far out into the timeline. Then I went through and added the lip syncing for each of the scenes, and had to re-animate the shapeshifting. once i was done, i made adjustments as needed, drew up a title card in Photoshop, and brought the exported animation into after effects to add the title card to the beginning of the animation wth a cool looking transition. then I rendered it, and finally finished the animation.