Creating quality animation on time and on budget requires a masterful blend of art and technology. Toon Boom's Harmony software solution provides all the input, output and integration tools that animators need - including digital animation with virtually no clean-up.
What puts the "boing" in "Gerald McBoing Boing" ? What puts the groove in all the keen teens in "6TEEN" ? Animation, of course-animation with Harmony.
Montreal 's Toon Boom Animation Inc. launched its Harmony software for animators worldwide late 2004, and the animation production solution has already earned praise from leading companies like Ottawa 's Mercury Filmworks (providing animation for "Gerald McBoing Boing" ) and Toronto 's Nelvana Limited ("6TEEN" ).
Animation tends to be an art form with a split personality. One half is fanciful, with its head in the creative clouds, while the other half is focused on no-nonsense, well-grounded production that must meet demanding schedules. Making the production end realize the visions of the creative end, on time and on budget, has always been a challenge - but a little Harmony in the studio has made creating quality animation faster and easier.
Nelvana's animated show «6TEEN» follows the minimum-wage adventures of six teens toiling in the most sacred of adolescent hangouts - the mall - while leaning on one another for friendship and support. Michael Lahay, Technical Producer for Nelvana, says that Harmony provides the support his animation team needs.
"The quality goals for «6TEEN» were to create a cut-out style show with a higher overall production quality by using Toon Boom Harmony's advanced animation and compositing tools," Lahay says. "While development and design began in Flash, we were able to successfully transfer our production to Harmony. This gave us the ability to not only build hierarchies of these complex characters, but create a final product that would have needed multiple software packages to achieve."
Toon Boom's Harmony solution offers animators all the production tools they need in one, integrated system. "Harmony eliminates the need to stop production, work in other applications to clean up drawings, apply special effects or render, and continue working in the main application used for production," explains Joan Vogelesang, Toon Boom President and CEO. "Harmony is a vector-based animation system, which means you can output animation for any distribution medium, be it the Internet, television, film or HDTV, without any loss of quality," she adds.
Direct to Digital... and More
Harmony allows animators to follow a traditional animation workflow as well as a completely paperless animation workflow. With digital production, animating can begin right away. Artists can draw characters directly into Toon Boom Harmony, and voilà-the clean-up stage virtually disappears. With Harmony, drawings can be modified at any stage with little effort. Better still, elements of work can be stored in template libraries, allowing creations to be used across animation projects.
Venerable animation company Nelvana Limited has found that these features are especially beneficial for its cut-out animation workflow on «6TEEN», which Nelvana produces in-house.
Maintaining files using Harmony also makes final rendering easier. "6TEEN" is rendered as a Targa sequence, from there our intranet stitches the frames together into a Quicktime with a filed guide for review," Lahay says. "Once the scene is approved, the Targa frames are delivered to post."
Start to Finish
Professional animation houses like Nelvana and Mercury Filmworks are enjoying the benefits of a sole software like Harmony that can take the production process from start to finish.
"If you want to follow a traditional animation workflow in Toon Boom Harmony, you can do so," says Joan Vogelesang, Toon Boom President and CEO. "All of the tasks in the digital production stage can be started and completed in this single solution. In fact, if you want to do the tasks outlined in the production stage preceding it, you can do those in Harmony as well! Harmony makes many options available to you, including a paperless animation workflow."
Mercury Filmworks is an award-winning innovator of animated content development that has always embraced advanced production techniques. Mercury has been using Toon Boom Concerto/Harmony to supply quality animation for "Gerald McBoing Boing", a new series based on Dr. Seuss' classic character, licensed by Cookie Jar Entertainment Inc.
"With all our projects combined, including "Gerald McBoing Boing", we produce a total of 45-60 min of animation a week, or 40 to 60 seconds of animation per animator per week," says Mercury's Line Producer, Kyle MacDougall. "Our entire team consists of 140 people in the studio, operating on two shifts between 7:00 a.m. and 12:30 p.m."
It's a busy place. With two series in production and several more in development, the Mercury staff includes one Director, one Assistant Director, two Animation Directors, one Art Director, one Technical Director, four Animation Supervisors, seventy-five Animators, six Key Animators, eight Compositors, six Technical Setup Artists, four Designers, 2 FX Designers, eight Layout Artists, eight Storyboard Artists, two Key Color Background Artists, four Background Painters, 2 System Administrators, 2 Production Coordinators, and 2 Production Assistants.
Toon Boom's Harmony allows animators to lay out 2D vector-based imagery in a 3D environment, build multi-plane moves through the space, and create cinematic camera effects with a virtual camera.
Feature-Rich
Nelvana, too makes good use of the efficiencies that Harmony can provide on its show, «6TEEN».
The staff breakdown for the production of two episodes of «6TEEN» (produced simultaneously), includes one Production Coordinator, one Director, two Animation Supervisors, two Assistant Directors, one Technical Producer, five Designers, one Background Color Key Artist, one Color stylus and one Background/Layout artist, four Storyboard Artists, two Technical Setup Artists, one Key Poser, 16 Animators, three (Final Cut Pro) Editors and a System Administrator.
Nelvana's animators are finding Harmony to be feature-rich. "While morphing is possibly Harmony's most powerful tool set, I would say that the fact that all of Harmony's animation tools were built on top of Opus, already a successful compositing package, is it's most positive feature," says Nelvana's Michael Lahay. "This gives us the ability to not only create animation that would normally require several different software packages, but it also enables us to adapt the software to the production. With Harmony, we can make anything from cut out animation to traditional without having to compromise or change the style to suit the tool."
When it comes to being a one-stop animation solution that smoothes out the wrinkles - and animates them as well - Harmony lives up to its name.
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6TEEN
Gerald McBoing Boing |
