Film made in Toon Boom

Hello!
Two years ago I graduated from Loyola Marymount University’s animation program, and I thought I’d post a link to my thesis film. I used Toon Boom Digital Pro and loved it. The node based compositing mode was top notch and made working very easy, even on 2 hours of sleep!

Anyway, here’s the link!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovT8mbYE85E&feature=email&email=comment_received

It’s got a little blood and some naughty language, but the tone is pretty upbeat.

-JJ Conway

Loved the pink slippers! I thought that it had great use of perspective and I liked the timing.

How did you do the panels at the start?

yeah that was pretty awesome.

Did you do the backgrounds in Animate or photoshop?

What did you use the 3D moddeling for?

Hi JJ,

Thank you for sharing your thesis film - really good work. How much time did you have to complete the film?

The reason why I’m asking is that I spoke with an art director who advises the thesis project be no longer than 2 or 3 minutes. I see your film is a lot longer than that. Hope you don’t mind my asking.

Cindy

Wow, awesome Animation!

Hey I’m glad you all liked it!

mdhender, the panels were roughed on paper. They were then cleaned up in photoshop on three different layers. Then we brought them into Toon Boom to do the timing/framing.

TheRaider, backgrounds actually started in Maya. We exported jpegs with the framing we needed, then we painted over them to look more like an animation BGs. We used Maya for all the vehicles since it’s way easier to animate airships and trucks in 3d rather than by hand :smiley:

Cindy, from start to finish we took just about 1 year (July 2007 - June 2008), although most of it was done between October 2007 - May 2008. July - early October were spent storyboarding an earlier version of the film that was almost 100% scrapped. From late October - December 2007 we storyboarded the version you see here.

December - March I rough animated the entire film (except for two scenes which my friend Brendan did). March - May my partner Matthew cleaned up the entire film while I painted all the BGs and composited the film. All along we had minions coloring the film for us. We graduated in May, then took the next two months to polish it (at a very leisurely pace). Sound Design was done in this time period by a very talented friend of mine.

I understand why 2-3 min is suggested. It’s really easy to pull off, and you have PLENTY of time to make something look really nice. If we were only trying to do 2-3 minutes in a year the animation would be just stellar, but I was roughing out 45 sec a week so I only had time to do animation that did the trick. But yeah, obviously longer is possible. “Hammerfist” is 9:27 and it took two people (plus a LOT of helpers), but in 2005 a senior did a film that’s almost 18:00, in about a year, ALL ALONE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-1Ltl2kPY&feature=related

But he barely slept and lived in the lab.

Uh… I hope that answered your question? Sorry it was so rambling!

Hi JJ,

thanks for letting me know about your thesis project; I appreciate it, much.

Cindy

That was awesome! Great work!!

~Lilly