Month: March 2008
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Back from TOONBOOM, MontrealBack from 4 days in Montreal, Canada, the coldest place on earth!!! Although, our contacts and hosts at Toon Boom Headquarters assured us that this is not normal. Montreal is experiencing its worst winter since the 1970′s.
Aside from the weather shock, icy biting winds and Eddie’s “flu”, we were both pleasantly surprised by the picturesque charm of this small city and how ‘French’ it felt. Everyone spoke French, street signage was all in French; there were shops selling all French comic books; we ordered meals from French menus; croissants were delivered to our hotel rooms every morning… I mean, it didn’t feel like the North America that we knew. It was a cultural breath of fresh air – great people, great food, cobblestone streets, lots and lots and lots of snow.
So how did we end up here in Montreal?It all began way back in May 2006 when IDT-Film Roman (now Starz) had organized a ToonBoom Harmony/Solo training session for a bunch of L.A. Flash animators. Eddie and I were part of this training and demo session. See this previous blog entry. At the time we were both impressed by the software but had already started pre-production on Los Campeones so it wasn’t a good time to try a new animation program. (Sidenote: ToonBoom Harmony is the studio package; ToonBoom Solo was the standalone program which has now been upgraded and renamed ToonBoom Digital Pro.
As post for Los Campeones is coming to an end and we are gearing up to start on our next project, we contacted ToonBoom to request full training on this program. They flew us to Montreal and offered us a five to ten-day intensive hands-on training course. Unfortunately, due to our many responsibilities and tight schedule here in L.A. we could only do three days. We wished we had more time to thoroughly immerse ourselves in the training but anyway, it was a still a pretty awesome three days and we are glad that we could make it to Montreal at all.
Some features we like about ToonBoom Digital Pro (bear in mind that we are coming to this from Flash 8′s numerous bugs and limitations):
- Z-Space! and a Camera that moves in 3D space with multiplane effects.
- Color palettes for character models! We miss this feature of traditional animation.
- Filters and effects
Training with Jean-ReymandSome features that gave us a headache but could be kinda cool when we get a handle on them:- Infinitely more sophisticated than Flash is the process of animating with many different views on the workspace (eg, Camera view, Drawing view, Top view, Network View etc.). It is a bit confusing to switch between the views and having to remember which menus and which buttons go with which views. The “Network View” with all its modules and cables is a trip! This is also where animated filters like shadows, tones, glows, blurs are implemented.
- Inverse Kinematics - We went through the “19 steps to rigging a master template for a character”. Eddie note: I personally want to move away from the ‘marionette’ style/piece by piece approach to animation that has come about mainly due to Flash, so I found this part of the training pretty hard going. However it is useful to see what the capabilities are.
- The ToonBoom timeline, and the concept of Pegs and Elements, which are very different from Flash and require a different mindset. “Pegs” in TB are the equivalent of “keyframes” in Flash. TB’s Timeline’s top-to-bottom arrangement of layers also does not truly display which drawings sit on top or underneath, as you are dealing also with z-space properties. Don’t quote me on this, please. Still learning …
We also looked at Storyboard Pro - which exports to PDFs and/or Quicktime animatics.
Link: YouTube Storyboard Pro presentation
We came away from ToonBoom and Montreal with very positive feelings. One very exciting thing for us is that the people developing ToonBoom used to work in the animation industry, are passionate about their product and are constantly upgrading according to their clients’ needs. They also travel the world supporting various animation studios in countries that we didn’t even think had animation studios!
More Montreal photos
Snow!; Park benches are completely buried in snow…Jacques Dutronc EP – from our music haul; Wapati (Reindeer!) for lunch
Cool record store – Primitive Records on Rue St Denis
Decadent chocolates from Suite 88 Chocolatier
Time was short and so we hanged out around the same couple of streets during most of our stay, and enjoyed the dining and shopping recommendations from our friends, Otis, Maurice and Chipple. We definitely want to return to Montreal for a proper visit when it’s warm, and NEXT time, I will try poutine!
- Z-Space! and a Camera that moves in 3D space with multiplane effects.
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Promotional Artwork That You Won’t See Anywhere But…
…At
The Best Fish Taco in
Ensenada on Hillhurst Ave., Los Feliz. A big thumbs up from the Tsetse Fly for our favorite local lunchspot. The poster was a X-mas
present to Joseph Cordova, the owner of the joint who feeds us well
with fish and shrimp tacos. Last time I spoke with him he said that
many a customer has shown interest in this poster. And Joseph almost
beat up a drunken guy who tried to steal it.
The
first ever Los Campeones
stamp! Created at zazzle.comWho will see this
stamp? Probably the SoCal Gas Company or LADWP. Or whoever we send snail
mail to This week is a big week. We are doing
D.I. and sound effects on the film and everything looks and sounds so much better than a week ago. Exciting stuff! Will try to take photos of “Post-Production” in action, the next time we remember.
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