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Buddy

By

Casey LaFalce

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Franklin College Interdisciplinary Studies degree in:

Animation & Illustration

University of Georgia

2018

Grade Earned:

Approved by: ______Date:______IDS Chair/Advisor

IDS Committee Members:

______Date:______

______Date:______

Dean: ______Date:______

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Acknowledgements

This thesis never would have come to fruition without the unstoppable love and support of my

parents, Steve and Leigh LaFalce. Thank you for so patiently raising an art student.

To my advisor and professor, Mike Hussey, you’ve been an incredible guide and

cheerleader throughout this tough process. Thank you for all of your instruction and time.

None of this would be as it is without my force-of-nature of a sister, Becca LaFalce, the Red

Friend to my Blue Friend. Let’s go on an adventure!

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Table of Contents

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 Concept …………………………………………………………………………… 2 Inspiration ………………………………………………………………… 4 Personality ………………………………………………………………… 4 Goals ……………………………………………………………………………… 5 Pre-Production …………………………………………………………………………… 6 Planning …………………………………………………………………………… 7 Aesthetic Inspiration …………………………………………………………… 8 Character Design ……………………………………………………………… 10 Storyboards ……………………………………………………………………… 12 Production ……………………………………………………………………………… 15 Photoshop ……………………………………………………………………… 16 Painting Digitally ……………………………………………………… 18 Colors …………………………………………………………………… 21 From PaintTool SAI to Photoshop …………………………………… 24 OpenToonz ……………………………………………………………………… 25 Traditional Cel Animation …………………………………………… 26 What to Hand-Animate ……………………………………………… 27 Post-Production ………………………………………………………………………… 28 Music and Sound ……………………………………………………………… 28 After Effects …………………………………………………………………… 30 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………… 33 The Final Product ……………………………………………………………… 33 Reevaluation of Goals ………………………………………………………… 33 Changing the Process ………………………………………………………… 34

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Figure Reference

Figure 1: Two boards, fantastical and grounded …………………………………… 3

Figure 2: Scene Layout in Excel ……………………………………………………… 8

Figure 3: Aesthetic Inspirations ……………………………………………………… 9

Figure 4: Blue Friend and Red Friend color and form reference ………………… 11

Figure 5: Boards for Scenes 7-12 …………………………………………………… 13

Figure 6: Boards for Scenes 25-30 …………………………………………………… 14

Figure 7: Basic Photoshop Layout, Scene ………………………………………… 13

Figure 8: Mike Yamada Brushes for Photoshop …………………………………… 16

Figure 9: Jon Neimeister Digital Oil Brushes for Photoshop ……………………… 17

Figure 10: Digital Painting Process …………………………………………………… 19

Figure 11: Using Photoshop’s mosaic feature to make a color palette ………… 22

Figure 12: Basic Colour Constructor Layout ………………………………………… 22

Figure 13: An Example of Blue Friend’s palette by Colour Constructor ………… 23

Figure 14: Basic PaintTool SAI Layout, Scene 22 …………………………………… 24

Figure 15: Basic OpenToonz Layout, Scene 15 ……………………………………… 25

Figure 16: Animating in OpenToonz …………………………………………………… 26

Figure 17: Music in After Effects ……………………………………………………… 29

Figure 18: Basic After Effects Layout, Scene 15 …………………………………… 30

Figure 19: Pre-Composition ……………………………………………………………… 32

Figure 20: Nearing the end of the compiling process in After Effects …………… 32

Figure 21: Background of Scene 21 …………………………………………………… 35

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T Introduction U

Drawing is an art of the utmost importance, as it sets the stage for what cannot be conveyed with words. Most artists I meet like to talk about how they knew they would be an artist from the moment they first picked up a crayon, how for as long as they can remember art was all they were interested in. This was not the case for me! I didn’t realize how important art was to me until I became invested in cartoons. Morning cartoons, slapstick cartoons, weighty cartoons, cartoons I would tape and watch later with my friends, cartoons of fantasy into which I could fall and live for twenty-four minutes at a time. I was engrossed in cartoons for a long time and took that for granted before I began exploring what appealed to me about animation; I realized that, freed from earthly limitations, animation could take the infinite possibilities offered by innumerable artists’ hands to create feelings so specific and relatable, then transform those feelings into movement and narrative that could only further strike chords within an audience.

No matter the audience.

This understanding and chord-striking is what pushed me to create the senior thesis project that I did. We all have strong emotions tied to certain people and places; I wanted to evoke my emotions in a way that would leave others with no choice but to connect my art to people and places that they know. This connection through cartoons and characters and imagined spaces is what I enjoy creating most of all, and my senior thesis project is a reflection of this. I hope that people watch this final product and can say with confidence, “This video is about me and my sister!” or “me and my husband!” or “my closest friends,” “You captured how I feel when I do X Y or Z,” and over that recognition a connection will be made.

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Concept

The product of my senior thesis is a three-minute illustrated video. Acting as a sort of reel of my abilities as an Animation & Illustration major, the final product will be comprised of full illustrations that I have animated to varying degrees. The illustrations will be diverse in approach and in detail to show off my range of artistic know-how, but will remain cohesive due to my innate style as well as the appearance of two established characters who will be present in every scene creating a simple sort of narrative. The emphasis of the video itself will be on design, artistry, and environmental animation. It is important to me that the artist’s hand remain at the forefront of the viewer’s mind while watching this as my primary background is in studio art, drawing, and illustration.

I decided very early on in my process to include environments that would be both very foreign and very relatable – places that were fantastical and unfamiliar to which people could find parallels in their own lives, as well as scenes of a sincere grounded nature. For example, a dark flooded cavern asking to be explored and adventured by torchlight, juxtaposed with a cozy couch and late-night video games. These scenes are very different in substance but represent an equal importance to me as they can offer very similar meanings, as well as equally strong reactions.

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Figure 1: Two boards, fantastical and grounded

These scenes could be pulled together or pulled apart to invite comparison or contrast, depending on the viewer’s own experiences. And, by design, they also serve to showcase my ability to create both fantastical and mundane spaces – indoor and outdoor, grand and compact.

The characters themselves were hugely important to the success of this video as I needed them to remain readable, relatable, generalized, and empathetic all at once. My goal was to create a likable duo that acted mostly as a blank slate, but still projected personality. They would traverse through high fantasy and mundane chores enjoying each other’s company all the time.

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Inspiration

The song I chose for this project was one I already loved: “the land of the giant flying beast” by the artist In Love With A Ghost. This song was my initial inspiration – I chose it before I drew any images, knowing that it recalled images of comradery and journeys across landscapes. This song was the driving force behind the whole project, and it didn’t hurt that I knew I would never get bored of it.

Before I began my senior thesis I had recently seen The Red Turtle for the first time, and it was hugely impactful to me. A feature-length film with no dialogue was something I hadn’t seen before, and I was really taken aback by how much they were able to communicate. This, partnered with the discovery of my chosen song, I knew I wanted to create an animation with no dialogue. So much animation involves voice actors that when you see one without them, it really makes an impression. Not only this, but I learned repeatedly throughout my collegiate career that a successful animation does not need words; what should be conveyed can always be told through body language and setting.

At this point I had gleaned the emotions I wanted to express by choosing a song, and I knew that I wanted to deliver those emotions wordlessly. I then looked to what excited me most

– fantasy. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, classic books and films such as these raised me and gave me a huge appreciation for the fantastical and the magical. I would count them among this project’s most important inspirations as well.

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Personality

While I pulled from my past influences constantly, it meant the world to me that this video ultimately represented myself and the approach that I can bring to the table as an artist and as a person. I needed my personality to shine through, I needed the find the fine line between creating what comes naturally and creating what I needed to prove to others that I could do.

I faced a few speedbumps in deciding whether to tackle narrative in my project. By my initial plan the song goes uninterrupted by conflict, and I debated for a long time whether it was important to include discord of some sort. A narrative with conflict is usually what propels animation with characters, after all. I ultimately decided against it, however, as aesthetics are what drove this project and levity and joy are what drive my love of aesthetics. This is a circuitous way of saying that I didn’t feel as though I needed a narrative or a conflict to feel like I could get myself across as an artist, and my main hope that I could express my feelings of pure adventure and closeness seemed achievable by my stress-free sequences alone. I wasn’t so much making a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, but a diary which you could open to any page and find something to warm your heart.

Goals

I needed to come out of the other side of this project with a product that I could proudly send to those who might hire me. This was my biggest goal. I wanted a solid entity that represented myself that I could present to those who wanted to know who I was as an artist. I learned from a few trusted artistic sources that it is better to have a few completed pieces of work than it is to have many unfinished pieces; this way, with a neat and polished artistic product that

L a F a l c e | 6 you can call your own, the person who is evaluating your work knows how much you can accomplish, that you have follow-through and vision.

This project was also very carefully crafted so that it would best represent the education that I’ve built for myself at the University of Georgia. It was very important to me that this project embodied my four-year education in a succinct way. I hoped to take all aspects of the major that I had built – my years with animating, painting, drawing, art history, creative writing, and more – and combine them into something that felt like four years of work. Not to mention that just by completing this process, I would come to better understand future projects and what it takes to get to a cohesive finished product.

T Pre-Production U

While all steps of creating animation are vital, having a successful pre-production stage seemed particularly crucial in this endeavor. With so many illustrations and compacted into three minutes, and with precisely zero verbal cues to provide a springboard, the initial planning of this video was key in its success. I knew how important it was that the settings resonate and that the characters appeal.

However, I knew that in the future I would be working closely with my drawings attempting to match the vision that I created in this stage of my journey. So much changes in between planning and polishing that to make anything too rigid would cause frustration in the

L a F a l c e | 7 future, and to account for this I focused on simplicity at this stage. That way I could expound upon detail or reign it in, depending on where I needed to take a scene.

Before I entertained any concrete drawings, I made sure I hashed out every aspect that related to atmosphere or timing. Therefore, in the pre-production stage, I focused on planning, character designs, and storyboards. These are the things I needed to remain consistent, and therefore cemented early on.

Planning

The planning stage of this project was , as a three-minute video must contain many images to remain interesting to an audience for the duration of the song. With so many illustrations in play, from the outset I needed to take into account the timing of the transitions, the timing of the animation, the timing of the camera movement, the order of the drawings themselves, and the range of ideas – the aesthetics and the contexts of each. It took me weeks of just listening to the song on repeat, writing down ideas for scenes that could match certain moments in the melody, to get to a place where I felt as though this could be a successful piece. I drew timelines, and during that process realized that I needed to find a happy medium between how long it took a viewer to digest a moving image and how many beats the song offered for its showcase. Ultimately and after much reworking I reached a basic outline that I was proud of.

I tried several methods of organizing this outline before I landed on Microsoft Excel as the best program for creating a plan. I made the spreadsheet that I ended up referencing every step of the way – titled “Scene Layout,” this Excel document was an informal way for me to

L a F a l c e | 8 keep track of a scene’s timestamp, its order, its content, its animation, its camera movement and conjointly its necessary canvas dimension, and my progress.

Figure 2: Scene Layout in Excel This method of organization was extremely helpful throughout. It was color-coded so that

I knew how much I had finished (green), how much was in progress (yellow), and how much I found I didn’t need (red). It let me leave notes to myself referencing issues into which I knew I might run, color palette ideas that came to mind spontaneously, etc. It was also very fluid; while my planning was thorough, things changed all the time during production. This sheet was my rock, my main sense of order throughout this entire process.

Aesthetic Inspiration

Deciding what this video would look like should have been overwhelming, but luckily I consume a hefty amount of animated media in my day-to-day. I had a good idea of the aesthetics

I wanted to exemplify (see figure 3) – ’s cozy interiors and their bright, crisp

L a F a l c e | 9 outdoor environments, the way they ground fantasy and make it tangible. The simplicity and color management of Cartoon Network’s long-running show Adventure Time, its whimsy and its visual boldness. The autumnal warmth of Cartoon Network’s miniseries Over the Garden Wall was perhaps my biggest inspiration, as that show’s ambiance has influenced me deeply since I saw it first in 2014.

Figure 3: Aesthetic Inspirations, clockwise from the top: 1. Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro, 2. Cartoon Network's Adventure Time exterior, 3. Adventure Time interior, 4. Cartoon Network's Over the Garden Wall, 5. Studio Ghibli's These few are only the first examples that came to mind when I began, surely my lifetime of watching cartoons acts as a sponge that I now wring out over every piece of art I make. These specific shows I’ve listed, however, do all revolve around adventuring and journeying of some sort or another. My hope was that in channeling them, I could further suggest this theme.

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Different things catch my eye about each of these precedents. I took inspiration from the way that the artists at Studio Ghibli made outdoor environments seem so lush and healthy, using heavily saturated colors and large shapes for greenery out of which details appear to characterize each plant. I am also consistently amazed by how much detail goes into their interiors, how much personality they manage to fit into a space. By utilizing or maybe over-utilizing detail in my pieces, I hoped to do something similar. Adventure Time inspires me with its very bold yet cohesive color palettes, as well as its soft linework and ability to express space through repetition of form and use or misuse of established rules of perspective. Over the Garden Wall has an amazing way of creating an atmosphere that you would think you could walk right into. It remains obviously a drawing but uses light and shadow in a way that conveys a very convincing space, often using rays of sunlight through trees almost as an object to communicate depth in a way that I want to emulate. Its scenes are warm and familiar and beautifully composed.

Character Design

Character design is so exciting to me. I knew from the very beginning that I would only have two reoccurring character designs in this project, and that if they didn’t follow through, the whole impact of the video would be dampened. Characters are the viewers’ conduits, the way they process the world they’re seeing – I needed to know that whoever I brought to life, the viewer could see themselves in. A lovable blank slate.

To achieve this, I began by working towards entirely androgynous designs devoid of gender, race, symbolism, or clothing that might imply class. I also wanted them to exist out of

L a F a l c e | 11 time, for until one of the friends wakes up at the end at the sound of their cell phone it is unclear what time period they live in or even which world they live on. So instead of references to existing designs, I focused instead on shapes. It was important to me, too, that these characters be easily read from near or far, so I focused on strange proportions and dramatic silhouettes made by their clothes. Their colors, too, I made very different from each other as well as very loud, to set them apart from their environments. After their colors were chosen (see Colors, pg. 21), I began to refer to them as Blue Friend and Red Friend.

Figure 4: Blue Friend and Red Friend color and form reference I drew them as I wanted them, on-model, in my color and form reference (figure 4).

However, I drew them with intended fluidity. Remaining on-model can be an important standard for certain cartoons, but personally I’ve never seen it as a necessary aspect of all animated productions. Cartoons are meant to express, and the confinement of remaining on-model (not diverging from the chosen forms and proportions of your characters) can only restrain

L a F a l c e | 12 expression. Because the designs of my environments would be changing, it only made sense to me that my character designs be prepared for that. My overall focus was on illustration, not continuity. I drew them in a way that, if I wanted, I could represent them as just simple shapes –

Blue Friend as a triangle with a circular head and Red Friend as a long skinny polygon with organic forms at each end for hair and shoes – or even just splotches of color. Conversely I could detail them heavily, give them texture, leave them flat, stretch them, whatever the scene called for.

Storyboards

I made storyboards with two purposes in mind: one, to organize them into an animatic and test out the video’s timing, and two, to create thumbnails onto which I could build full illustrations. They were black and white images, quickly drawn, that laid out the space and, importantly, demonstrated the way the lighting lit that space. Because the project’s focus is on illustration and there weren’t many complex animations to be done, I didn’t include many indications of animation. The direction I needed for that was in my Excel Spreadsheet. I made notes of what would be animated and how, sometimes I would include direction about whether the shot would pan over the canvas or focus in on a specific aspect. But mostly these boards were used as an artistic foundation, the initial composition thumbnail that set the stage for later detailing.

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Figure 5: Boards for Scenes 7-12 Take for example figure 5. These boards are good instances of the fluidity of the process, as half of them changed almost entirely in production. Scenes 7, 8, and 9 overwent a compositional overhaul in a later stage that I hadn’t planned for, but the finished product looks better for it. On the other hand, scenes 10, 11, and 12 appear exactly as they were drawn, to a tee.

I carried them to Photoshop and used them as groundwork for painting. I left all of my boards as black-and-white images as that’s standard for storyboards, but also to emphasize to myself later on where the light source was and what it affected. It was helpful for me to first draw the scene, and then fill it in a dark grey or a light grey depending on how much ambient light filled the scene. I would then erase from the grey where the light would fall, cutting away at the shadow where light hit. I learned this technique at the start of my collegiate career; for a long time I would paint an image and then draw the shadows in last, but I was taught that naturally the world

L a F a l c e | 14 is in shadow and that light is what cuts away at it. Drawing in this way, cutting light away from shadow, produces a much more realistically lit image.

Figure 6: Boards for Scenes 25-30 During the boarding process is when I began to realize how camera movement would affect by layouts. Thanks to my planning process I knew that I would need to accommodate this, but I didn’t realize how much until I began to draw for wider or taller scenes. For example, scene

30 in figure 6 is of the two Friends laughing in a bar with fantastical mythical clientele, inspired by the classic Dungeons & Dragons-esque setting. I knew when creating my timeline that this scene would fall on a longer beat in the song taking up almost twice the amount of time that another illustration might, and that it would be nice to make it a panning shot. This would double the number of things to look at, thus keeping the viewer’s attention, and would also add variety to the visual beats which have so far been fairly stagnant. With this longer board as a foundation for the shot I was able to do the math and create a canvas wide enough that a 1920x1080 camera could slide across it at a legible speed that also matched up with the song’s tempo.

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T Production U

After completing as much pre-production planning and drawing as I could, I was sufficiently intimidated by the road ahead. Production, as far as this project was concerned, involved a lot of drawing, painting, color coordinating, reevaluating, and animating. All of this was coupled with the fact that I would essentially be teaching myself how to use two new programs. But I started with what I knew – illustrating.

Essentially my process was this: I would evaluate my boarded thumbnail, then I would take to the internet for color palette inspiration. I would begin illustrating in , using the thumbnail as a guide, and painted it as I would any other digital painting while keeping in mind which layers needed to be separated to allow for animation. Depending on what needed animating, I would leave out aspects of the scene as I didn’t want to animate in Photoshop. I would then take the individual layers from Photoshop, separate them and animate between them in the program OpenToonz. Satisfied by that I would then export the completed sequence of frames, take those back into Photoshop, and use Image Sequencing to make those frames into a short video that would later be compiled in post-production.

I had never done anything like this, but through my animation, illustration, and visual narrative classes, I had learned more than enough to piece those individual processes together and create a productive system for myself. Organization was key, and it soon became imperative that I organize my personal files in a way that couldn’t be confusing in the slightest. My Scene

Layout spreadsheet also became more of an asset than ever, as I marked each scene as I worked with it and kept a written record of my progress.

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Photoshop

The illustrating portion of this journey began with Adobe Photoshop. I’ve used this program plenty of times in the past, but always through work or school. Due to the demanding nature of this thesis, I finally acquired it for myself and got down to learning the nitty-gritty of it.

I knew its features for photo editing, but always used other programs for painting. It took me a while to become comfortable with the software in this new context.

Figure 7: Basic Photoshop Layout, Scene 13 Figure 7 illustrates my standard painting layout in Photoshop; I keep the layers tool and the brushes tool open and available at all times as they are most important to the process.

Layering the painting separates elements of the environment from one another, so that I can draw between or on top of them. For example, in figure 7 the feet and the ground are on separate layers so that animation can happen between them or behind the legs. I can create clipping masks over layers so that I can paint solely over one preexisting layer, which makes highlights and

L a F a l c e | 17 shadows much easier to create. The layers become immeasurably important later when I bring them individually into OpenToonz in order to animate what moves between them.

Brushes are probably the most important aspect of digital painting, for just like in the real world different brushes create different textures. I use plenty of Photoshop’s generic provided brushes, and I’ve made a few of my own. I’ve also downloaded a few free brushes from other artists from a website called Gemistry.

Figure 8: Mike Yamada Brushes for Photoshop Figure 9: Jon Neimeister Digital Oil Brushes for Photoshop

These brushes are meant to mimic real art mediums – Mike Yamada has brushes for ink and pastels (see figure 8) while John Neimeister provides different brushes that would be used along with oil paints, such as filbert brushes and flat brushes. I’ve used all of these to get different

L a F a l c e | 18 styles across in different images.

Painting Digitally

Digital painting is what I love to do, and it’s what I’ve been doing the longest. It was the part of this project that excited me the most, as it’s what I have the most fun doing. All paintings are different in that they require varying approaches and techniques – some call for linework, others for detailed modeling, etc. – but essentially my process can be broken down into five parts

(see figure 10).

I start with my thumbnail and take it into photoshop. I set that layer’s blending mode to

“Multiply” so that my original sketch remains for me to see while I paint underneath it. This keeps me on track. I then identify the light sources; if there are two, I’ll often map out their sources and the objects that those sources affect with different colors. In figure 7, for example, those two light sources are the sun and the torches on the wall, and those lights and their affected areas are outlined in red and blue respectively. Next I lay down flat colors, just messily throw down the colors I think fit the scene until I find something cohesive. If a light source is going to be changing a significant portion of the composition, I’ll begin blocking out those colors, too (as

I did in my example). The third step is cleaning up those areas of color and doing away with the

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Figure 10: Digital Painting Process

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thumbnail. At this point the original sketch isn’t necessary as I’ve finished laying out all my pieces – it’s just time for cleaning up those shapes.

The fourth step is detailing, and this step is probably the most intense as it involves adding in any extra shadow and then cutting away from the shapes with light. In the instance of figure 7, as well as many other illustrations in this project, it also entails linework. I prefer a really soft, thin line on my art but that’s just personal opinion. I don’t usually place line over every aspect of a drawing, because it doesn’t need it; often the shapes of colors speak and stand out for themselves, but if I want to emphasize a particular form against its background, or distinguish shapes within a form, I will outline it. For example, the red chair in figure 7. The red chair on its own stands out against the rock wall, and it’s also pushed into the background quite a bit. It’s not the focus of the image, just a detail. So I left it mostly un-lined but detailed aspects of the cushion so that its forms would appear clearer. Lastly I add ambient details, a glare on the screen and some specks of dust that float in the sunlight.

Again, this isn’t the approach I took to every painting, but this is the approach that works best for me and therefore I used it quite a lot. Sometimes the steps would end up jumbled, I would begin with linework as it seemed most important to the piece, or sometimes I would omit a step like linework all together. It was important that I prove I know how to tackle a painting in different ways from different angles depending on what I felt the scene called for.

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Colors

Color is obviously hugely important to this video, I’ve mentioned it many times already.

A scene isn’t complete without a palette, and without the proper palette it will not send the right message. I had three different processes for finding the colors I wanted to use for my scenes, and all three proved useful. Hopefully, by using and expanding upon these processes, I’ll learn more about color theory and I won’t turn towards programs so much.

The first and easiest way to pick a palette is just random color generation. I only used this method a couple times, as more often than not I had a palette in mind before I started. But if I had no idea, no reference point, nowhere to begin, I would use a website called Coolors. They randomly generate palettes of five colors, and if you like a color they give you, you can save that one and generate again to pair it with four new colors. You repeat this process until you have five cohesive colors that act as a base for a scene. This is actually how I came up with the color schemes for Blue Friend and Red Friend; I knew I wanted them to be blue/green and red/orange but finding colors that looked unified was troubling me. Trial and error ended up being the key to that success.

My second method is finding any old image (I usually browsed Pinterest for ideas) that had a pleasing color spectrum and taking that image into Photoshop. There I would make a mosaic of the image using one of Photoshop’s built-in tools (see figure 11). With this mosaic of an image, I had a color palette – I could then use the eyedropper tool to select colors from that pixelated image and use them for painting. I could deviate from this color selection of course, and I did, but it made for a very nice jumping-off point. Images of nature were especially useful.

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Figure 11: Using Photoshop's mosaic feature to make a color palette (Zona) The third method was less of a complete method and more color extrapolation. If I already had ideas for a palette but didn’t know how lighting would affect objects in the environment, sometimes I would turn to a program I bought several years ago called Colour

Constructor. One of the handiest programs I’ve ever invested in, Colour Constructor lets you input a scene’s lighting color and an ambient color and outputs how it would affect colors in the space. It even takes a second light source, if one is present. This was extremely useful, for

Figure 12: Basic Colour Constructor Layout

L a F a l c e | 23 example, with my two main characters. I could save their palettes into the program, input the scene’s specifications, and out would pop swatches with their new, color-corrected, palettes.

Figure 13: An example of Blue Friend's palette if the overriding light were a warm pink, if the ambient light were a soft green, and if there were an orange directional light from behind - calculated by Colour Constructor

As you can see in figure 13, the program offers two palettes for each color – one for each light source. I’m glad to have stumbled upon this program, it came in handy in several confusing instances. My fear is that I might grow dependent on it, so I look at it as an opportunity to advance my knowledge on color theory.

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From PaintTool SAI to Photoshop

I’ve been digitally painting for a very long time, since I bought my first Bamboo tablet in my junior year of high school. Since then I’ve used a program called PaintTool SAI to create digital art; at the time it was the cheap alternative to Photoshop, but it had all I needed to get started. I became fairly entrenched in the program, I made my own brushes and got very comfortable with the user interface and its features. It was less complicated than Photoshop, and by the time I started this illustrating project I knew it like the back of my hand.

However, I understood that PaintTool SAI is never used in a professional setting.

Photoshop is, and I thought it made sense to take this opportunity to ease myself into a more practical software that was better known. To be entirely transparent, I would sometimes revert back to PaintTool SAI for particular drawings. Every now and again I needed a certain brush or to draw lines over a scene a certain way that just came faster to me in this alternate program.

Figure 14: Basic PaintTool SAI Layout, Scene 22

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I’ll likely continue to use PaintTool SAI for the rest of my life – it’s intuitive, it’s simple, it’s just a good program for no-nonsense painting. But I’m glad I deviated so much from it in this project; knowing Photoshop well is already paying off in projects outside of this one. My inclination towards PaintTool SAI probably stems from simply how well I know it, while

Photoshop used to seem foreign to me. But soon enough I will be equally familiar with them both.

OpenToonz

I had heard of the program OpenToonz from my animation professor, Mike Hussey. It was a software originally called Toonz, and it was used by a handful of animation studios including Studio Ghibli which I’ve already mentioned is one of my prime inspirations. Several years ago it was made opensource and became OpenToonz, and then one year ago I downloaded it to do this.

Figure 15: Basic OpenToonz Layout, Scene 15

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I was excited to hand-animate my scenes – cell animation, in my opinion, looks like it contains a lot more love, for lack of better words. Because it’s drawn frame-by-frame, the artist’s hand is in every second. It might look more disjointed, especially in my case because this is by far the most I’ve ever tried to animate by hand, but ultimately it’s likely closer to the artist’s interpretation as the computer factors into the process so little. Flash animation and the like definitely have their place in animation, I’m not debating this. I used it in this project even. But for the purposes of my animated illustrations, I felt the need for that personalized touch that

OpenToonz offered.

Traditional Cel Animation

What’s interesting about OpenToonz is that it’s a 2D animation software that pretty closely replicates the process of traditional hand-drawn cel animation. For me this meant that I could import my photoshop layers as cels, have a background and a foreground, and then animate the middle ground. In figure 16 you can see, the blue cels are my imported and unanimated foreground and background. Sandwiched between them are green cels, signifying animation. The first one is the overall shape of the standing rock giant, and the cel on top of it is his features and detailing. The boxes located within the cels are the frames, and this particular

Figure 16: Animating in OpenToonz

L a F a l c e | 27 scene goes to 48 frames. The giant is still for the first 9 frames, and slowly climbs to full height over the next 27. This will leave 12 frames for him to stand at the end, allowing the viewer to take in what they saw. Moving at a rate of 6fps (frames per second), this should all last 8 seconds. Perfect for its place in the song.

What to Hand-Animate

OpenToonz was an incredible and timely find, but I didn’t hand-animate my whole project. I had a schedule to follow, and hand animation is truly very time-consuming and tedious.

For certain things I turned to (see After Effects, pg. 30). After Effects is a very complex program, but after having taken a few classes I got the basics – and even some fancy skills – under my belt. OpenToonz was my default program, but I had to assess what needed to be animated and know how good it would look if it were done in After Effects.

Character movement was almost always hand-drawn. There’s a naturalism to hand-drawn things that can lack, and people and animals need to seem the most fluid objects in the space. Things that rotate can easily be done by hand, such as fans and windmills.

Details where things swing, I often do those in After Effects as objects there can be connected to paths and the paths are easily manipulatable. After Effects is also good for more technical FX, such as particles and rain. It was built to handle situations such as those, and I used its particle effects plenty of times to simulate dust in the air. If I hand-animated a scene entirely, I would export the frames individually from OpenToonz and compile them into a rendered video back in

Photoshop. Otherwise, the layers would go to After Effects for animation.

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T Post-Production U

As I made my way through my list of drawings, I would gather the finished ones (as rendered, hand-animated videos, or as layers of drawings to be animated digitally) and bring them to Adobe After Effects. Here I made a large project in which to place my compositions and lay out my scenes. It was a process to collect them, time them correctly to the music, animate what needed to be animated digitally, add the necessary effects, and render it all out together.

This process, though, I was more familiar with than any other piece of this puzzle so far; I had been taught the basics of After Effects and beyond, I understood its timelines and its graphs.

Compiling doesn’t intimidate me so much, and at this point I was also just excited to see the project looking like I wanted it to!

Music and Sound

I’ve already referenced the fact that I found my music first, before any other aspects of my project came to fruition. I knew that my senior thesis was around the corner, and I had it in mind that I wanted to create an illustrated video of some sort. But I had no idea what that video would be like until I heard In Love With A Ghost’s “the land of the giant flying beast.” The music gave me the idea for a story with two companions who were on a journey – the sweeping song covers so much ground and is uplifting all the time. Perfect for what my Blue Friend and

Red Friend are going through.

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In Love With A Ghost is an independent artist who is pretty clear about allowing people to use their music for things like animations, but to be sure I sent them an email. I laid out the situation of my senior thesis, told them that I would not be profiting off of it but that I did plan to send it to potential employers! Just a few hours later they thanked me for asking and gave me the okay to use “the land of the giant flying beast” as the base for this project.

Figure 17: Music in After Effects

I downloaded the song and placed it into After Effects before any drawings so that I would know where to place the images on the three-minute timeline (see figure 17). The program has a helpful waveform feature that allows me to see where the song escalates and deescalates; often, I match up my scenes’ beginnings or ends to these moments to create a piece with proper flow. My original planning stage also helped with this, as my touchstone of a spreadsheet told me approximately how long each scene should last and how certain effects should change with the music.

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After Effects

I’ve been using After Effects for a couple of years now, for projects of varying complexity. It’s a great program, one with infinite uses, but it’s also almost comically complex in its design. Luckily I’ve had professors show me the ropes, and I was able to find what I needed.

Figure 18: Basic After Effects Layout, Scene 15

My basic setup can be seen in figure 18; the way it works is that if I already had a completed animated video, I would drag that into the timeline window and drag it to the appropriate place on the timeline so that it would play with the music. If I still had images to animate (in figure 18, the boat on the water is a separate layer that I needed to animate bobbing up and down) I would pull that in on top of the video or other drawings and animate it separately using the “Position” or “Rotation” options provided. After Effects uses keyframes, and in figures

L a F a l c e | 31

17 and 18 my keyframes can be seen underneath the component “[XV – BOAT.png].” Each keyframe represents a position that the object holds in space – on one keyframe it will be in a certain position, and twelve frames later I’ll set another keyframe where it is just a little lower on the screen. Twelve frames later I’ll move it back up to where it was initially and set it with a keyframe, and then repeat this until it bobs up and down at an appropriate speed. I used this method to make things move up and down like this, make them swing side to side, make them move across the screen – I could even grab all of the components and pull the entire drawing across the canvas, and by setting its position with keyframes I could simulate camera movement and panning.

After Effects also offers presets for rain and particles that you can lay on top of your drawings, or between drawings to create the appearance of rain outside of a window. As dust particles can often be seen in rays of light, this was a useful tool for adding some dimension and realism to my drawings in a way that also conveys movement and life.

A huge aspect of working in After Effects was staying organized. With over thirty scenes, each comprised of smaller components, I had to keep things systemized. The moment I felt like a scene was completed I selected its individual videos, drawings, and effects, and pre-composed them (see figure 19). This lumped all of these aspects together into a folder that I could later edit independently if need be. By the end of it all, I had a slew of pre-compositions all neatly lined up to the music (see figure 20). My timed-out storyboards were underneath, hidden by my final drawings, as they acted as a guide. And all that was left was to put it all in After Effect’s render queue and wait an hour for it all to be rendered into a movie file.

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Figure 19: Pre-Composition

Figure 20: Nearing the end of the compiling process in After Effects

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T Conclusion U

The Final Product

It bears repeating all the time: I knew when I went into this with such lofty goals that my video wouldn’t come out the other end exactly as I imagined it would. I hoped it would come close, of course, but because I had to teach myself new software and deal with time constraints and other college courses, I would have to leave a few things to be desired.

That said, I am very happy with my final product. Parts of it were done more quickly than others, and for this reason I hope to go back and see it finished in a way that makes it feel more cohesive to me. Despite the things I would (and will) change, I’m proud of myself for working so hard to make a singular piece of media that represents me and my efforts so succinctly.

Reevaluation of Goals

My goals for this project from the get-go mostly involved finishing the project and making it something that I could send to potential employers. I completed these goals, but in completing them I created for myself many new goals. They were born out of the issues I had, as well as the successes – from the beginning I should have had more specific goals, ones that I could tackle along the way rather than wait until the end to fully realize. For example, I was dissatisfied with a few of my color choices; I should have paid more attention to prepping myself on color theory, rather than turning to so many programs for help. I also stated in the beginning that I wanted to use lighting in my illustrations in a new way; I was inspired by Over the Garden

Wall’s use of light to enhance and create the illusion of space. Once I was finally drawing,

L a F a l c e | 34 however, I just sort of fell into my old patterns. I didn’t make enough of an effort to use techniques in new ways, and now that I’m aware of this I’ll make it a goal to be more conscious going forward.

It’s always glaringly apparent to me that improving one’s own artistic prowess is always a work-in-progress and a journey. I’ll constantly be inspired by things, and I’ll always want something about the way I’ve drawn to be a little different. What’s important is that I realize these new goals I discover along the way and meet them so I can grow as an artist.

Changing the Process

I should reiterate that I am very proud of my final product, but there is so much about my creation process that I should change in the future. I struggled with the timing of things most of all; despite my intensive planning stage, I still ended up doing the most work at the end of the project, when things felt down to the wire. Better time management would have no doubt made for a better video.

One thing that made this apparent is that I didn’t have the time to take a deep-dive into the innerworkings of OpenToonz. I learned enough to animate, but I feel like I just scratched the surface of that program that proved so helpful to me. I had to animate plenty of my scenes in

After Effects for various reasons, which ended up working, but it worked at the cost of consistency. I wish I had devoted more time to hand-animation. Even learning how to animate –

I wasn’t very familiar with 2D animation, I tried to teach myself with books and websites. There were discrepancies in my animations, and they were mostly due to my lack of attention to the volume of the forms I was animating. I didn’t create enough character sheets outlining the characters from all angles.

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Even before the animating process there were things that needed to change. I didn’t utilize perspective quite enough, and a lot of my drawings look fairly flat. When time grew short,

I ended up sacrificing so much of the detail that I craved to showcase from the start. Once or twice I accidentally ignored my original thumbnails when painting, which was a mistake because the instinctual nature of thumbnails is always worth trying to capture. These are things that, as the creator, I won’t be able to un-see whenever I watch it.

I also should have taken into account the way others would approach this video. I showed it to a professor of mine, and because the first scene of the video is a long-shot far away from the characters, who were designed to be minimalist shapes, he didn’t identify them as characters. He knew later, of course, but showing them up close would have been wise at the start because without humanizing them from the start he assumed that Blue-Friend was a plastic game piece because that’s what their shape resembled!

These specifics bug me because I had such different plans and expectations, and in the future I’ll pay more attention to them for sure. But ultimately I’m proud of my finished product,

Buddy, and I can’t wait to show it to the world.

Figure 101: Background of Scene 21

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Campbell, Jim, et al. Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network, 7 Nov. 2014.

Chelsea, David. Perspective! for Comic Book Artists How to Achieve a Professional Look in

Your Artwork. Watson-Guptill, 2005.

“Coolors.” Coolors.co - The Super Fast Color Schemes Generator, coolors.co/.

Hastings, Chris, et al. Adventure Time, Cartoon Network, 5 Apr. 2010.

Miyazaki, Hayao, director. My Neighbor Totoro. Studio Ghibli, 1988.

Miyazaki, Hayao. Spirited Away. Studio Ghibli, 2001.

“Photoshop Brushes.” Gemistry, www.gemistry.net/resources/photoshop-brushes/.

Sastrawinata-Lemay, Griselda, and Normand Lemay. 100 Tuesday Tips by Griz and Norm.

Grizandnorm, 2015.

Zona, Scott. “Amborella Trichopoda.” Scott.zona, Flickr, 28 Nov. 2008,

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