Technology

One of the most asked questions I have received during the process of my animation is, “What program do you use?” It seems that many people are curious about how and why animation actually works, so I am going to give a brief explanation of my process. I would like to preface this by saying that I am not an animation expert. In fact, this is my first major production. However, I do have a lot of understanding of the process from my past months of experience and the research I have done outside of this project.

The software I used is called Toon Boom Harmony Essentials. It is not a free software, I did have to pay to use it. It is the cheapest and simplest of their programs. However, since my project is being done in silhouettes, I figured I did not need anything too fancy.

Animation works through the process of drawing multiple frames and playing them quickly to create the illusion of movement. The brain will automatically fill in the gaps in between frames in order to make movement look very smooth. Currently my animation runs at 24 frames per second, but of course some frames stay for longer than just 1/24th of a second.

Here is an image provided by Toon Boom's website of what the interface looks like:

I am very grateful that I own a Microsoft Surface computer, which has been extremely helpful in developing my artistic and animation career. With this hardware I can draw directly on the screen rather than need to use a separate tablet. This gives me a lot more control over the product.

However, this software (or my computer) is not perfect. Sometimes it is extremely buggy. Sometimes the system does not respond and I am forced to lose hours of work. Some of the features do not seem to work as intended. These are simply the challenges I must overcome in order to make Open Arms a great production.