Project Goal

The main reason I wanted to make this animation was to show others that I can animate. I have many animation projects, but never one that I completed so I was very determined to finish this one. Another reason is to give people a peak into what my work life is like. Usually looks like this (maybe minus it being night time). The last reason is that I did not have anything to put for the “Programming” thumbnail on this websites homepage. You can check it out there now!

Reference Video

It has been a while since I have drawn anything. So to speed up the process, I filmed myself in order to get the angle and key poses for my movements.

Sketch

This is where I sketched the poses for the animation based on the video above. You’ll notice that I only drew the “key” poses which are the parts where the animation begins/ends so I can later add more in-between frames if needed.

Linework

Once the sketches were done, I added in the actual lineart. One fault that I noticed during this part, was that I did not have an actual character design in mind. So you’ll notice that his appearance changes throughout the animation. Lesson learned, make sure to have a design to reference before doing the line art.

Colouring

This was the most time consuming part. Every new frame had to be colored and shaded. Next time, I will refer to this colouring tutorial by Nicca Ch:

Coloring without AntiAliasing with ClipStudioPaint for Illustration and Animation

Compositing

I am surprised how easy it was to composite the animation. Though I believe this was because of my previous experience using video editors. I was going to reference this video How to Make Your Fake Anime Real but ended up just playing around with the many default effects in Adobe After Effects.

Here are the steps I took and some examples of the effects I used:

1. Exported the clip studio project into two videos. One for the animation of the character with a green screen background and another for the background. This is so I can apply different effects to both layers.
2. Imported the videos into After Effects and removed the green color by using the “Color Range” effect.
3. Added a mask to the computer screen so I can change the effects on it separately.
4. Added the “Curves” effect to change the lighting.
5. To make the flickering effect on the computer I just slightly changed the brightness up and down every couple of frames or so. I then added some of the effect onto the character.

Software

Started with OpenToonz. Switched to Clip Studio Paint when it went on sale. (usually happens once a year)

Touch Portal for quick shortcuts while in tablet mode for my laptop. Suggested in this video: 3 D.I.Y Wireless Macro Keyboards for Clip Studio Paint

After Effects CS6 for compositing. OLM for smoothing lines.

Hardware

Used the laptop HP ENVY x360 Laptop - 15-ee0003ca with the HP Pen.