It was a happy little accident realizing how easily you can manipulate stuff. It was a huge learning experience on my end and something I never would have foreseen. Everything that I did in The Gate had an alpha channel that was so light, and I could manipulate it so easily, that I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes, we have these backgrounds on the shows we’re working on, and they can slow down the scene because they’re so big. The compression technology in Toon Boom on those BMPs is amazing. I think they’re used to seeing the vector side and they don’t know that you can switch every element to a BMP. People on my Instagram say that they’ve always wanted to see horror animated, which is great, but also that they can’t believe I painted The Gate in Toon Boom. Mercury Filmworks’ interview with Shane Plante, following the release of The Gate.Īnd you did absolutely everything in Harmony? There’s no deeper meaning - I just really wanted to take a risk and try horror. I was going from the perspective of what you don’t see in animation. Also, I wanted to try showing suffering in animation. Right away, I realized I had never seen anyone animate anything about a grave robber. Christopher Walken was sitting on a gravestone and the camera was going up, and I was like, “Wow, that would be really cool to animate.” Boom! The idea for The Gate came from that camera angle, one shot, and has nothing to do with dialogue in the scene. But then I got really into watching a clip of Christopher Walken in The Prophecy. I was actually going to do something that was underwater as my first idea. I wanted to try something I’d never seen before and to take a risk.
Other than classic horror films, what references did you pull from as you conceived and created The Gate? We have a couple licenses for Harmony 21 and really want me to play around with it, because word on the street is the painting tools and brushes have been revamped.
Toon boom studio transparent software#
There’s something about painting in this software that I can’t get over. Painting in Harmony is actually a new hobby for me now. I wanted to test the boundaries and see if I could paint something with depth and tie everything together in Harmony. Everything you saw in The Gate was done in Toon Boom there was no outside software. I knew I put my all into it, but you never really know if it’s going to work or have the punch you want it to. Shane Plante: Horror can be very unforgiving, and I didn’t know if it hit home until it was done. The Gate is a 2d-animated horror short, by Shane Plante, about finding things that should have remained forgotten.Ĭartoon Brew: How do you feel looking back at The Gate now that it’s out in the world? We caught up with Plante to discover how he used Toon Boom Harmony to bring his vision to life - or death, as the case may be.
Toon boom studio transparent professional#
With The Gate, he was able to combine his professional experience animating shorts with his personal love for horror, creating something that is rarely seen in mainstream animation: terror. An animator at the Ottawa-based studio for the last 14 years, he is a self-described “jack of all trades but master of none” who has worked largely on Mickey Mouse shorts, alongside other projects. Working as part of the Mercury Shorts program, Plante created the entirety of The Gate using Toon Boom Harmony (including the backgrounds!). He brought his sensibility for scares to his latest short, The Gate. Mercury Filmworks’ senior animator Shane Plante has a taste for these ingredients of fright, having a lifelong appreciation for the genre.
In the meantime I'll keep playing with it til I get the results I'm after.Great horror storytelling shares key elements - fear, revulsion, surprise, and terror - which allow a scene to become truly haunting. I've got to look into what tbs 4.0 will offer in terms of messing with image elements, that could help out a bunch. I haven't tried it yet, I guess I would have to break it up in photoshop & use transparent backgrounds on all the layers? I don't even know if I have the photoshop skills for that. I'm wondering if I can somehow bring in my hand drawn stuff but cut it up & put it on different elements without tracing it in toon boom. I really like the image so far, so I think I'm going to try it in a variety of media (mediums?) I'm not too handy with watercolors yet, but I'll give them a try, & I already have something that looks promising done with ink, marker, & oil pastels. I was thinking about tracing this in tbs & putting the various pieces on many layers like you say, I'm just not sure it will keep the style I want it to have. I will be using toon boom for almost everything, but I want to have something that contrasts the vector look.
0 kommentar(er)
