A while back, AV Originals commissioned me to create a short-film length animation for their story, called Rona: Legend of the Kodiaks. While I’ve animated for other companies before, this was my very first animation of this quality. So, despite the amount of work it may potentially lead to, I ambitiously accepted it.
Given that many affordable proprietary tools aren’t accessible to me on Ubuntu / Linux (which I’ve migrated to years back and haven’t regretted one bit due to its low-maintenance), I decided to use all the opensource tools available on Ubuntu that I’ve learned so far because I sincerely believe I can use them for professional work, with the only limits being my skill.
The primary tools used for the animation are Krita for painting and rough animation layouts, OpenToonz and Synfig for 2D animation and in-betweening, GIMP for image processing, Inkscape for text and other vector needs, Natron later-stage post-processing, and finally Blender for not only 3D stuff but also bringing everything together. Audacity was also used for audio processing. That said, gThumb has also been pretty useful for me to organize and bulk-rename images, saving me plenty of time.
The best part about using these opensource tools was that the community was very helpful to me when I found myself unable to figure solutions to specific issues, particularly the OpenToonz and Natron community which helped me learn some tricks that helped speed up my understanding of the software to deliver what I needed to.
To start with, AV Originals gave me a rough storyboard to convey what and how they would like the animation to be made. Given that I wanted more clarity and also needed to design the flow of the layouts and subjects on screen, I decided to redo the entire storyboard from scratch for the animatics in Krita to see how it all flows. Several changes needed to be made in the process in case something did not work.
After everything was set, I began planning for each shot, and figured that I could exponentially reduce time by creating some assets I could reuse, whether 2D or 3D. So, I created a 3D environment in Blender especially because I’m not so good at painting backgrounds.
After that, I modeled and rendered a single tree with Blender’s Sapling Tree add-on, along with its mask and normal map from different angles, and created a random bunch of single-plane trees with some material-magic. I basically followed this tutorial for it.
Now, for the rest, I’ll just let the images and their captions speak for themselves. 🙂
I hope you all enjoyed watching this animation as much as I’ve enjoyed making it! 🙂
Credits where credits are due though. While I’ve definitely done the entire animation on my own, the project still had a team who’ve contributed to their specific parts, organized by AV Originals. So here they are:
Story and Characters owned by — Alana Von Ende
Animated by — Cyan Los
Kodiak sculpted by — Dopepope
Awesome music by — Jascha Heidicke
Credits-music by — Audiomachine
Voice Acting by — Will Walker (Channice), Dan Vo (Aklen), and Charley Taylor (Rona)