bronytoons

Hello everypony!

I’m back with another meandering ramble about our production. Today we’ll be looking at Character Builds.

Flash animation, unlike traditional animation, consists largely of prebuilt characters, animation cycles and lip flaps – all of these together constitute a build. Each character requires a front view, side view and 3/4 view for both sides of the body.

Once these are done they can be reused over and over for every piece of animation that requires that specific character cutting down on production time. The difficulty is making them first.

Our first short, Luna’s Lament, includes only two characters: Celestia and Luna. This was originally conceived to cut down as much as possible on pre-production. There was, however, a snag. Creating a show-accurate flash build requires a lot of references and, unfortunately, Luna’s character is very sparse on references – even going so far as to having model changes during the times she was on screen!

It was a mess to try and get Luna’s model to look good and her design went through a lot of revisions. Even Celestia wasn’t that well documented, especially since the show – in a sneaky attempt to get around the difficulties of animating the Princess’s shoes, didn’t show the ends of her legs during her walk cycles.

After a character is pieced out and all the different parts are made into symbols and graphics the mouths are made. These are all kept in a single symbol, graphics only and set to single frame mode. This makes it so that during lip sync all that is needed is to change the frame number to get a different mouth movement.

Other commonly repeated movements such as blinks and walk cycles are added after this, completing the final build.

I hope you have enjoyed this! In the next blog I’ll be writing about the way the animation is organized, produced and kept uniform as well as giving all of you a clip of our upcoming short!

~ Ink, Director.

Hello everypony!

Today I’ll be talking about the work and difficulties that go into making our backgrounds.

MLP:FiM has incredibly beautiful and detailed backgrounds – creating original scenes matching that style is very difficult. Here I’ll show the steps it took to make one of our backgrounds:

For this preview we’ll take one of the BGs in our upcoming short, Luna’s Lament. We needed to have a balcony outside Luna’s room in Canterlot Castle so in order to streamline the process, concept art was made as soon as the script was finished.

We had our artists draw up what they thought the balcony would look like in various different perspectives using a variety of styles. The most enjoyable thing is seeing all the creative ways the various landscapes and setpieces are realized! We pick over these in detail and after discussion and deliberation the favourite elements from each are picked out and added to the final concept.

Once a specific look for the balcony has been chosen and the storyboards completed, the different perspectives of the backgrounds needed are written down.

From there rudimentary builds are then created in Flash. These are vectors showing the perspective needed in the most basic way possible, including any vital props. We now have a build which can be used for animating in flash!

After that we hand the flash files over to our background artists and they start working… de magicks!

We employ an iterative process: if we are unsatisfied with the excellence in anything we simply go over it again and again until we’re happy with it. Finally, many many versions later we have something that we can consider worthy using in the actual animation.

Repeatable parts of the background are broken up into symbols which are saved in separate flash files. This is incredibly useful to reduce the time it takes to make the different perspectives of the background as well as keep other backgrounds consistent.

I hope this has been an informative and interesting first peek into our production! If you enjoyed it and would like to see more “Making Of” posts, comment below and tell us!

Thank you!

Hello everypony!

It has been a harrowing few months but we’ve finally progressed enough that I can say it is my pleasure to announce that we are going strong and well on the way to completing our first short.

Luna’s Lament.

The animation will be centered around the two Princesses and will be about five minutes long. This doesn’t mean we are shelving Dr. Whoof episodes – that is currently in production and being storyboarded! Animation takes a lot of time and resources so we decided to create Luna’s Lament as a trial run to get our workflow in order before attempting something as difficult as Dr. Whoof. I believe that we’ll be able to bring all of you a much higher level of quality this way.

Our team continues to grow and we’re looking forward to showing you all our hard work. Now that our animation is chugging along we’ll be posting content, some insights into our production work flow and some Q/A.

For now, here a preview of our Luna build:

I hope you will all enjoy what we’re making and are looking forward to it!

Cheers,

~Ink, director.