Oleander: Song Animation
This animation was a remake of an older animation I made on my iPad about three years ago. I hadn’t learned anything about animation techniques yet, and the program I used was a very rudimentary one. Contrasting that, the remake was made using Toon Boom Harmony on a much beefier device. This project was not only a way to show what I had learned about using Toon Boom, but also animation in general.
The characters are not mine, but from the Little Nightmares video game series. All I did was adapt their designs into a more animation-friendly form, and add the older versions for the little sequences when they grow up.
The original animation was made using a program called FlipaClip, which is a very basic program meant to work on mobile devices. I couldn’t choose a canvas size larger than 1280 by 720, because anything larger than that would slow down the apps’ performance. I also couldn’t use too many layers, or it would also slow down the app. Using any sort of blending modes, like multiply or overlay, was impossible for the version of the app I was using. They have since added blending modes, but that wasn’t a feature I had available to me when I made the first animation. In addition to the program limits, I also didn’t have a strong of a grasp on anatomy. A lot of the characters in the animation were children, which wasn’t something I had much experience drawing. When I decided to remake this animation, I had a lot of things I could improve on.
The storyboard more or less follows the original animations shots. Even if the old animation had issues, I thought the general concept was pretty solid. The storyboard focused on more dynamic poses with better character anatomy, and utilizing the camera movement that Toon Boom could do.
The sketch mostly focuses on getting the movements of the characters consistent across the frames, so when I animate the line art, I don’t have to guess where certain details might be. I try to put the most effort into the sketch phase, so I don’t have to do as much in the line art phase.
After I sketch out the animation, I can trace the sketch to produce the neat line art. Then, I used the paint bucket tool to fill in all the color right on the line art layer. Normally, I wouldn’t do this, because if I made a mistake with the coloring and went to erase it, I would erase part of the line art too, and there would likely be uncolored spots that the paint bucket missed, but Toon Boom has all of the brush strokes and fill color as editable vectors, which can be used to avoid any issues like that.
After I added backgrounds and some shading, I imported the animation into After Effects to add some text and a shaking effect. This video above is a version without those effects.