Environmental Storytelling through 2D Animation

 From my previous post you can see that I have gotten the camera movements I wanted down. IN this post I want to break down my process for adding in cloud movement, darkening the sky, making the rain effects and adding in some lightning effects as well.  I started with some research into making rain effects happen in Toon Boom and it seems that there are several ways the program even has its own particle effects system if you pay for the higher tiers. Looking back though I may have to find a better tutorial for the effects that I want. I took reference from my previous shooting stars animation and am going to use the same technique for the creation of rain, but we can't have rain without clouds. Below you can see the mock up I did. Using keyframe animation I created cloud assets and then added a few more clouds and brought them in using keyframes. I also used the same lighting effect I created for the blinding light camera effect and repurposed it for a quick lightning effect....

 I spent the day working on the waterfall animation and plotting out what else needs to be done for the project, but for now here is just a video render of the animation I've got so far.  I also wanted to document my set up for animation but I have to get some pictures together for that so I'll include it in my next blog post. I came back and realized that I should be breaking down my process a bit more so I am going to slide that into the other part of this post.  Here is what the layout of toon boom Harmony looks like when I  have it open on my desktop as you can see this is currently what my project consists of. This main window is the camera and the drawing board I usually use the camera view because it lets me see both the background and what I am drawing at the same time it is a great frame of reference. Below the main screen is the timeline there are two separate timelines. the first is the actual frames of the animation where I can draw frame by frame the ent...

 I wanted to at least get a test look at what I plan on doing for this project up onto my blog now that I have updated my background. I still have several things I need to do like split the layers and everything to create separate assets and create a few more assets but I was able to successfully import my image and create a simple animation that I am going to polish in the next few weeks. I feel like this project is finally making a lot more headway, but I still feel that I definitely bit off a lot more than I can chew with this one.  To import the images into Harmony I exported the file from Procreate as a photoshop document so that the images in harmony would keep their separate layers.  The import process was pretty smooth. I did intend to import with multiple layers, but I choose to import as a single layer for right now so that I can just create a test animation for right now. I plan on messing with the separate layers later on this week.  I took the background...

 From last week I wanted to choose a waterfall style project because I like the effects I found a simple animation of an island with a flowing waterfall and my aim is to add other animated effects. I found several refences that I want to use to create my final project. I found this useful breakdown of this specific animation by Yog Joshi on art station. I plan on using his tutorial as a breakdown to animate flowing water and use it with my initial idea to use Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling water. I just need to find the best way to break down the motion of flowing water for my purposes. This first example shows a breakdown of the initial motion and which direction the water is flowing down the cliffs. Going from the first position to the fifth position we can see the different changes in elevation affecting the flow of the water.  The next set of examples breaks down the individual pieces it takes to create the visual effect of flowing water. Using these separate pieces you can ...

 I am trying to come up with a complete timeline for this class to get a better feel of what I need to work on more in the upcoming weeks. My overall plan was to try and work more into an animated background or landscape to test the overall scope of my learning with this new program. Creating an animated environment instead of working on direct character animation because my skills are not completely there yet but I want to try and see how many moving pieces I can put together to have an attempt at environmental storytelling. Environmental storytelling is mostly used in games to evoke the feelings of a player to take note of how things work and what is going on without needing to use exposition. This style of storytelling is not just linked to playing video games but is used in animation as well to create compelling stories and to provoke the thoughts of the viewers in order to become more invested in the story and the world that they live in.  I still need to figure out what ...

 I have spent the last week practicing with Toon Boom Harmony to get more practice in using the program as well as working with my drawing skills. Using the second part of the tutorial I was able to create a simpler animation but this one tries to tell a simple story from a background I created in Procreate on my iPad. I initially created this image in Procreate with the idea that I wanted to create a simple animation added to it in an attempt to give the image a simple story. Using this as a background I was able to add a few elements to make the image come to life a little more I had to keep things a little simpler this week because I forgot to set the auto save on toon boom and lost a large chunk of the project. I wanted to take this image and add reason o why someone would be camping out in the middle of the woods at night so I added a meteor shower going on in the background and animated the campfire a little bit to bring the scene to life. The biggest part of animation itself...

Continuing on my journey to learn more about animation I decided to focus more of my efforts onto the digital side of things due to my lack of resources and knowledge of classic animation. My first attempts at this led me to decide between two of the more prominent animation software currently used in professional settings Toon Boom Harmony and Adobe Animate (the by-product of the original Adobe Flash program first used to animate digitally). After deciding that I already have some experience with Adobe software and wanting to try something new I went with the Toon Boom Harmony program used majorly with studios like Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Nickelodeon.  The initial download was pretty simple and I have started off with the 21 day free trial. Searching YouTube for some basic tutorials is found several good basics tutorials and I was able to practice the basics or the program.  Utilizing the tutorial and my own basic drawing skills I was able to make a simple ball bounci...

 An Exploration of Modern 2D Animation https://preview.redd.it/eusp57ctzng11.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=d986cb6dffb7e15e6d883615820ef2904be928f3     Unsure of where to really start my initial research last week so I decided that I would take a deeper dive into the styles of 2D animation that are currently still prominent in the industry today to pick a style and attempt to learn those techniques to better improve myself and my abilities. Most modern 2D animation these days can be broken down into two larger categories Traditional Animation and Digital 2D animation with several different approaches to each.       Traditional Animation or Cel Animation where animation cels are each individually drawn by hand and then placed on a peg board with backgrounds to be changed out each frame to create the illusion of motion in the scene. This style dates back to the earliest days of animation from the earliest Bugs Bunny cartoons to e...