Making of: Running from Lightning

In this exercise I wanted to try the (digital) cel animation technique.

First I began with the background:

Charcoal 1

I thought what could take place in this kind of environment, so obviously a frog running from lightning seemed logical.

The animation can be better, but the original intention of this exercise was getting a feel for the cel animation workflow.

After this first pass I traced a new layer on paper with all the lines intersecting each other. Opentoonz' supplementary scan tool 'GTS' has a trace feature which automatically recognizes the lines and converts them to rasterized lines, which makes filling in the colors a lot easier.

The paint bucket tool was used to fill in all the 'cells':

In the end I opted for black and white, since the colors didn't blend too well with the rest of the scene. I will also try adding shadow cells next time.

Opentoonz has a helpful node system which I used for final compositing - matting out certain pieces and adding little effects such as noise and inverting the lightning.

OT Nodes

Thanks for reading. Hope this may help someone!