From sketch to animation using Toon Boom Studio.

Step 1: Initial rough sketches. All images courtesy of Toon Boom Studio™, a trademark of Toon Boom Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.

Step 2: Onion skinning where we see the overlay of frames within an element.

Step 3: Camera view with timeline.

Step 4: Main camera view.

It's the summer of 2000 and the Web has seen more stars than the Hollywood Squares. Adam Sandler, Matt and Trey, Jim Brooks, Tim Burton -- they were all looking for their 15 Megs of fame. With the promise of an unprecedented audience, uncensored expression and unlimited capital, old world artists met new world technology with open arms. Well, almost.

First they had to contend with some pretty serious limitations. They discovered that online entertainment must be short form animation, with potentially very imprecise timing. This presented a unique challenge for artists accustomed to twenty-six minutes of tightly synched dialogue. Luckily, some of these issues were mitigated through the use of vector-based graphics.

Most people are familiar with Macromedia's popular vector-based design tool and for the most part Flash was the software of choice for these talented storytellers. However, Flash is primarily a design application and although it does an incredible job of simplifying the animation process, it is by no means a traditional animation tool. It was not created with the animator in mind.

Toon Boom Studio was created for animators and serves as an ideal supplement to Flash. Designed by Toon Boom Technologies, this well-focused software offers increased drawing accuracy, better lip synching, 3D scene planning and camera effects. Not to mention it just feels more like an animation tool, with a rotating light table, exposure sheets and onion skinning. This must be how designers feel when they use Flash! Toon Boom Studio can still output to a format usable in Macromedia Flash, allowing one to add layers of interactivity.

Facilitating Accuracy
Accuracy was a major concern for all of the Hollywood talent, especially during initial development. They wanted to be certain the work they produced would be true to their vision, no matter what the circumstance. Matt and Trey swore by the importance of timing. Cartman is funny not just because of what he says but also because of how he says it. They insisted that whatever they created for the Web have precise mouth positions and movement. Unfortunately, software cannot always control the quality of these variables. One has to consider the power of the audience's computer as well. Low-end machines will have choppy animation no matter how accurate the original production. However, there are some steps that can be taken and seasoned South Park animators Crispy and Todd, went to great lengths to insure precision.

In the first episode of Stainboy, evil Staregirl is defeated when an enormous light fixture falls on her head, creating a gory mess. As the climax of the story, the timing had to be exact. The sound effect had to match the event; otherwise the entire episode would be ruined. Burton's animators worked for days to meet his expectations and in the end, they did an incredible job of capturing the important moment by tweaking the frame rate and cheating the timing.

In both cases, Toon Boom would have brought a layer of great ease to these otherwise difficult situations. The animators would still have had to consider the processing ability of their computer but they would have been in familiar territory. They could have used familiar tools to find greater accuracy without such frustration and they could have presented their work to the talent in a more predictable form.