The Weekly Filmschool #3: Animation #2, The Story Thus far
It's been about two months since I declared my intentions to make a fully digital animation in Toon Boom Studio. So how's that going? Well, it's roughly 75% done. However now that summer has rolled around my initiative has been somewhat sapped. Not to mention work and trying to get this Filmmaking Club started at the University.
But just as an interesting side, I figured I'd post all of the backgrounds I did. You can find them all here on my Fickr Gallery.
Under the cut I'll show you the basic process I went through to make them.
The first thing I did was take a piece of paper and scribble the basic rough sketch of the background. Then import it into Adobe Illustrator as a template.
I like nice, clean lines with little variability. So Illustrator is perfect for me. Most of the inking process is done with just simple mouse clicks with the Pen Tool, but occasionally I also used my Wacom pen tablet to make short work of complex lines.
Once the inking process was done, I imported everything into Photoshop.
Coloring cartoons or comics in Photoshop is super easy. You set the line art layer to multiply and have a layer underneath for color. You then use the Magic Wand and other select tools to fill in the colors.
I used the default color pallet I made for the houses. Meaning I colored the houses, yards, and street with no regard for any lighting effects later on. The sky is on a separate layer due to some effects that'll be added later in AfterEffects.
Now With the sky in place (the major light source) I can start shading. Obviously I going for a hot day so red will dominate.
Once again the select tools are used. The polygonal lasso tool is very hand for making shadows.
Finally, I made a red shape on a separate layer that only covers the foreground and set it to color burn. This gave everything a red tint. Then used a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer to make everything really bright and vivid.
