The global animation industry seems to presently be in agreement, with most of Disney, Warner Bros and Nickelodeon’s recent 2D animated features and major TV projects being animated primarily using Toon Boom, not to mention independent productions and the glut of TV series headed up by Fox’s entire Animation Domination line-up. Since plunging into Animate Pro it’s been my first port of call for 2D animation when going the traditional lightbox route isn’t an option. In actuality the program has turned out to be the antithesis of this first impression. Having been presented with an already out-of-date, foetal version of Toon Boom Studio at one point during my MA in 2006, I wrote the software off for too long assuming it was a clunky relic, vaguely reminiscent of the Macromedia applications Adobe didn’t have the confidence to eventually usurp. More often than not this desired output warrants a bit of a software cocktail – get that Flash walk cycle into After Effects, sprinkle it with some magic plugin dust and you got yourself some purty-lookin’ animation, boy – though one program has recently stood out as being exceptionally all-encompassing to us 2D folks. Largely it depends on that balance of intuitive interface, ease-of-workflow and impressive end results.

A great concept can, with varying degrees of effort and adaptation, be realised just as effectively in a variety of programs, yet we all have our comfort zones – independent studios and professionals who cut their teeth on Adobe’s Creative Suite still swear by Flash, After Effects et al, the British children’s TV scene clearly has a friend in the Cel Action pipeline and aesthetic, CG mograph artists tend to love themselves some Cinema 4D while CG character animators oftentimes cluster together in the AutoDesk camp, and so forth. Animate To Harmony: The Independent Animator’s Guide to Toon BoomĪ love letter to a piece of software seems a little daft given my dual (dueling, on occasion) roles as both animation freelancer/director and researcher/writer It’s obvious to many that, leagues ahead of the software itself, it’s the artist and ingenuity of a core idea that makes an animated project a success.

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