Author: Sophie Milton

I have been researching studios to potentially apply for internships for and The Line was one of the studios that stood out to me. Mostly because there seems to be a majority of 2D animation work in their portfolio, but also I think stylistically my work could integrate nicely and it wouldn’t be difficult for me to replicate styles they have in their previous work. At the moment I have no idea what role I’d most like to undertake e.g. clean up, rough animation, storyboarding etc. I’m hoping the next couple of projects this year might help me narrow that down slightly.

I like that their studio is run by animators and they prioritise the quality of the work and they specialise in 2D animation. Also their website is really inviting and fun!!

Their work includes: Song Machine and Humility – Gorillaz, Wargroove, Giants by True Damage and Worlds 2020 – League of Legends, The Mighty Grand Piton, Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit, Amaro & Walden, Buzz Chickson and many more.

It’s located in London, which, while costing an arm and a leg in rent, is familiar to me and obviously really easy to get around without a drivers license!

Clip Studio is by far my favourite 2D animation program I’ve tried, out of Adobe animate, TVPaint, Toon boom Harmony and Photoshop, so I did some research into the Studios around the world that use it.

OLM Asia SDN BHD

OLM Asia is a Malaysia-based animation studio and the seventh company in the OLM Group, which creates 2D animation, 3D animation, and VFX for countless shows including the well-received “Pokémon” series.

They have also expanded our horizons by producing TV shows and films for the global market, and we continue to delight and move animation fans across the world.

They use Clip Studio Paint for television series including “Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon”, “Yo-kai Watch”, “Beyblade Burst Turbo”, and “Cardfight!! Vanguard (2018)”.

While they currently use Clip Studio Paint for the animation process and Paintman for the finishing process, they said they would like to start using Clip Studio Paint in the keyframe process as well.

Nippon Animation Co.,Ltd.

Nippon Animation is a Japanese animation studio known for its warm and charming anime series such as “World Masterpiece Theater” and “Chibi Maruko-chan.”

Clip Studio Paint is used in many professional contexts; for illustration and comics as well as animation. Artist tips and tutorials are available on Celsys’ web service “Clip Studio TIPS.” These tutorials appealed to them as a way to quickly discover the possibilities of the software and to find solutions.

The price was also an important consideration. They had to think about the price of a single copy before making a bulk purchase for our entire company. Clip Studio Paint has a very affordable price point, which meant we could provide copies to more people.

* Unfortunately there has been a change to the one-time-purchase perk of CSP and they’re introducing a pay-by-udate feature which is likely goin to mean animation studios filter out their use of CSP in the coming years!

SIGNAL MD

 SIGNAL-MD was established in 2014 as the fourth “IG Board Group” production company affiliated with such companies as Production I.G. The company creates digital drawings for TV animation series such as Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note as well as promotional videos and television commercials.

The starting, ending and drawing quality of lines are really important for animators, and these are remarkably better in CSP. The software is fully equipped with all of the functions we need in this industry. Functions such as light table and onion skin can be operated with a simple touch of a button. Even though the same functions are available in other software, these functions are a lot easier to use and understand in CSP. There is a large number of tutorials that you can learn from as you work. There is also a large amount of materials and tools made by other users.

Kamikaze Douga Co., Ltd.

Kamikaze Douga is constantly bringing joy and surprises to animation fans with works such as the opening animation of the TV animation series JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and the end sequence of TERRAFORMARS.

In addition to animation, Kamikaze Douga were involved in a TV commercial for manga magazine Shonen Jump +, and designed the logo, costumes and sets for the NHK TV series Let’s Tensai Terebi-Kun (Genius TV Kid).

They had been using CLIP STUDIO PAINT even before the animation features were added. Some of their jobs were for animation with a manga-style touch where they had to make an artist’s line drawings move, so they used CLIP STUDIO PAINT and just made it work.

They happened to be considering which tools to use for our new City Hunter project at the time CELSYS was looking for beta testers for the animation features (until September 2015). When they heard about that, they wanted to try the features so they contacted CELSYS.

CLIP STUDIO PAINT has many clever features like gap filling that make things easy for artists, and things like the start and end of lines make your drawings look identical to analog drawings.

CLIP STUDIO PAINT makes it easy to get a team together because as long as you can draw, you can use this software, even if you’ve never done digital production before. Their staff mastered it in one day.

It was also easy on their budget, as many graphics and animation tools are expensive.

So, from this research plus the recent pricing news from CSP which means studios are less likely to use it, PLUS the fact that all these studios are in Asia and I have no intention of moving there anytime soon, I guess I’m going to have to begrudgingly accept that I need to use TVPaint as my default software from now on!

My mentor Sheetal gave me some advice and insight for starting out – “For Bridging the gap I would start to research which studio’s you’d like to work for. And to get in touch and keep in touch with any new work that you do. So they can see your progress over the next year. I have a very good example of this – I got in touch with a studio (Strange Beast) and it took almost 2 years before I actually worked with them. The first 18 months was just me contacting them every time I had a new reel. Having a regular rapport really paid off!”

I guess I’m mostly just worried that I’d come off as overbearing and annoying and be sent straight to the spam folder? I’m probably overthinking it but I don’t really know how the whole process works and if that’s common or not.

“Larger employers offer apprenticeships or internships. To enter these programs, applicants must be attending a college animation program. Interns at Pixar for example, must be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program, or have graduated during the year the internship begins. Program participants might work as camera and staging artist interns, who “create sequences of shots that convey the story through the application of traditional filmmaking principles in a 3D computer graphics environment.” Other internship options at Pixar are available in story, art, technical direction, production management, marketing, engineering, research, media systems, financial, and editorial. Internships last 12 weeks or 6 months during the summer, fall, and winter school terms.

Volunteering with a local animation or film production company is the next best thing to landing an internship. This experience will give you a great introduction to the field and help you to make valuable contacts in the field. And one new way up-and-coming animators have made themselves known to the animating community is by attracting an audience on the Web. A portfolio of well-executed Web ‘toons can help an animator build his reputation and get jobs.”

The Bold as Brass pitch was chosen for the LIAF project and I was really excited to be given a team and begin working on it.

I have found over the years that I am notoriously bad at working in a team, I either need to be told exactly what to do and when, or I end up getting super picky about final details. I reached out to my mentor Sheetal for some advice with this and she told me to remember to play to everyones strengths and not focus on their weaknesses.

With that in mind and finding that my team were on the less experienced side, myself included, I initially gave them a few extra style frames to complete for the animatic to help them try and get a handle on drawing the characters in the style I’d used. WE aslo had a discussion about some of the changes the LIAF team wanted, as well as adding a couple of extra shots to make the end of the animation flow more smoothly.

From that we made a production schedule, with jobs for everyone. I did take on the more that the others, not only because it’s my idea but we discovered I have more animation experience and therefore am a faster worker. I also had more time to put into the work as I didn’t have a regular job to commit to then, whereas the other two had.

I also took on Sheetal’s advice and gave them jobs that I’d known from their previous work they’d thrive at. For example, Shilpi has a lot of handwritten text based work on her instagram so I asked if she would hand write the names for the credits.

There were a few hurdles we had to overcome as a team, for example sometimes I couldn’t move on with my tasks until they’d completed theres, or I’d have to ask them to make slight changes on the colouring of the instruments. In that case I ended up making a reference sheet to make it easier for them.

But overall the experience was really rewarding and we all definitely learned a lot from it. Outside of the teamwork aspect, I personally learned the most in the compositing stage as I’d never really done anything like that before and only used the animation software to finalise the work.

I will upload the final animation once LIAF shares it as I’m pretty sure we’re not allowed to upload it anywhere yet!

Over the Easter break I began preparing my pitch for the London International Animation Festival brief, choosing to focus in on the Long Shorts category. During the intense rounds of feedback we got in the few weeks after we came back, it really drove into me how subjective everything is and how peoples different experiences in the industry shape their advice. Most of the feedback I got from my two thirds finished pitch was helpful, although one really left me despairing for my idea. Also the feedback on how to present a pitch was vastly different too which led to a lot of confusion within the class. However getting the opportunity so see my peers’ work was really helpful and reassuring to me, as well as fascinating seeing all the different takes everyone had on the different categories.

My actual pitch went really well despite the fact I wanted to throw up all the way through it. The feedback I got was really reassuring – they liked that I had very clearly told the story I wanted to animated verbally as well as visually with lots of style frames, they liked my more abstract take on the difficult long shorts category, and they thought that it was really funny especially the panning section where the characters look somewhat like their instruments – they even suggested pushing that joke a little more. Overall I’m really happy with the feedback and excited to see if my pitch gets chosen!!

The simulated work experience with the second years went well, although I didn’t get a great deal of work to complete as my second year was still in the early stages of their animation. 

They initially sent me their main character’s turnaround, construction sheet, character design development ideas, and their animatic, with the note that there are elements they’re in the process of changing (in the animatic). They asked for my feedback and I told them I really liked their animatic as it is and think it’s more powerful with the character development points it has at the moment, but obviously they know their character’s better, and they know what story they want to tell so I understand if they want to change it. I fell a little bit in love with their characters to be honest!!

When I reached out to my second year they very kindly asked what roles I felt most comfortable and confident about undertaking. Honestly I don’t feel confident about most of the roles in making an animation yet, and I don’t think I’ve done enough of it to work out which part of the process I enjoy the most, so I told them I was happy with anything. I was eventually tasked with drawing front and side profiles of their two secondary characters for their character designs, and later two more characters.

I completed the tasks pretty quickly as mostly all it involved was tracing their sketch with slight adjustments to make the proportions more even and accurate, and then looking at their main character’s turnaround sheet to see their style for drawing people sideways on. They also gave me the colour palettes for each character.

There were a couple of things that weren’t initially clear when the task was set, for example, elements of clothing that might only be seen from the side, but we easily cleared them up in follow up emails. 

There were some things I didn’t touch on though, for example, I remember from the character design class last term, Bianca kept stressing that it was important to draw the feet flat in a turnaround, and in the main character’s turnaround sheet that I was sent, the feet aren’t flat from the front angles. Similarly in the sketches sent through for the tasks I had to do, the feet in the front angles aren’t flat. Because of this I didn’t draw the feet flat, because maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a stylistic choice? But I think I will email them to ask later on. 

Truthfully, I find most collaboration projects difficult because I’m a bit of a control freak and like to know exactly when I am expected to be doing work so I can plan my other work and free time around that, therefore waiting on someone to send me work to do, not know how much or how long it might take me was difficult and stressed me out more than it should. I am going to work on this as its something unavoidable in the animation industry and most workplaces! 

As tricky as I found this to be in the beginning though, I definitely think this experience warmed me up to collaborative projects a bit more, as my second year was very considerate and friendly, and considering we’re apparently going to be collaborating more next term this is great!

I also found it quite freeing to work in something that isn’t my own style. These days I kind of feel like I’m putting myself at a disadvantage by sticking so constantly to a drawing style, so it was great to be forced out of that and work on replicating someone else’s style. 

Lip syncs definitely sounded intimidating to me before the session on it, but now having tried it, I’ve discovered its really fun and pretty easy with the resources we were given.

However the given audios were pretty uninspiring. I opted for the “stupid french oaf” one because it seemed the most interesting. I do need to edit this one a little more though as the pigtails seem to have a life of their own at points!

When I got feedback for (an earlier version of) this, I was told to exaggerate the “f” sounds more which definitely made a difference.

However for the chosen lip sync, I used a Korean audio clip, and in Korean they don’t actually have an ‘f’ sound in their alphabet…

I opted for this clip because I never had time to try an earlier optional exercise that was set – two people interacting on a bench – and I wanted to practice animating people reacting off of each other. The character on the left actually laughs for a good 5 seconds more in the following section of audio, but I cut it because it was a bit of a nightmare to try and animate for now. I’ll definitely try working on it more in the easter holidays though for some practice!

Okay wow so if I thought colouring the body exercise was tedious, this was hellish! It was such a struggle to make everything neat as the character is so much closer and you can easily see any flaw. And also, I discovered that when you colour things, it really points out all the errors you’ve made in the line-art. For example, once I’d coloured his hair, it was obvious his hairline was jumping around like crazy so I had to make a correction layer to remedy that.

I also had to find a kind of compromise with the hair and facial features when it came to the colouring, as oftentimes the expressions in the eyes and eyebrows were completely covered up by the dark hair. Therefore I opted for a sort of semi-transparent effect with the hair, but that just meant twice the work for the features as I couldn’t just bulk colour them because of the different tones. Overall I think it was worth it though because the expressions are much clearer now.

With regards to the actual timing and line art aspects I’ve found that I tend to rely heavily on the blurry, one frame frames which I am currently blanking on the name of! They do make life a lot easier, however I think too many in once short animation can be a bit over the to, and this one is definitely toe-ing the line.

I am however, quite proud of how much better at follow through I’ve gotten. The hair in this is a bit too exaggeratedly swishy at some points, but I think the swaying earrings worked well and I really don’t think I could’ve done this just a couple of months ago.

I’m not as happy with how the sound turned out on this once, as some of the sounds don’t really match the characters mouth shape but I was doing the best with the resources I had!

EDIT: Again, I posted this on my fandom-heavy social medias and the response was incredible again!

People in the comments were incredibly sweet and asking for more animations of the hedgehog terrorising this kpop group…

Like before, I know that this only got attention because it is fandom-related, but I don’t think getting your foot in the door with fan art is a bad thing!

Today’s storyboarding workshop was really insightful and interesting. I am continuously amazed when visiting lecturers show us their work and its stuff I find interesting and its ofter stuff from popular culture! I really did the wrong BA course welp!

After Bianca showed us examples of projects she’s worked on and what makes a storyboard, we were set a task of converting a short script into a storyboard:

The main feedback I got was that this would be great for a film storyboard but an animation storyboard would need more information which I definitely agree with. Because of the time limit I ended up cutting a couple of things in an attempt to show something finished , like the character fumbling for the phone was cut which was stupid of me! I should really stop going into panic mode as soon as I’m set with a time limit of an hour or two because my brain doesn’t operate in panic mode at all!

I found this exercise super fun! I used a story told by one of the kpop idols I follow, which motivated me more to turn it into a finished-looking piece. It also made me realise how much more work goes into an animation even after you’ve worked out the timing and line art etc. Colouring this was nothing short of a nightmare!!

Following the feedback from December’s crit, I decided this would be a good animation to try adding sound to as it’s the most dramatic one I’ve made so far, and I personally think the sound adds an extra level of exaggeration to the movements.

EDIT: I posted this animation on my social media and the response was mind blowing!! Particularly on twitter…

I am fully aware of the fact that this only gained so much traction and 300,000+ views because it is fandom related and so many people in the fandom know the story I’m portraying (which they’ve never had a visual for before). If it was an animation of a random person picking up and sniffing hedgehog poop it wouldn’t have gotten even a fraction of the attention this got. But despite this I cant help but feel happy about the incredible comments I got from this! Here are a few of them:

I’d already started my facial acting exercise with the same kpop character and hedgehog before this blew up so I’m looking forward to the response if I finish and post that one too.