This blog has a new home at http://www.telluastory.com You are all invited to continue reading more about the amazing world of 2D animation over there. This is an illustration I did a couple of years ago. I love it! Click on the image to visit the new address.

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hello everyone. I have a few things that I want to share with you (although I won’t just yet). First of all, I want to show you The Deadly Truth. Its release is loooong overdue. I thought that was going to be an easy thing, but once again, having a demanding day job and (yes I know) not enough discipline has pushed that deadline endlessly. The purpose was not perfection; just mastering Toon Boom software. Shame on me. After my work trip to Holland, I came back to a lot of backed up work that just had to get done. Things are more relaxed now, so I’ll get right on it. Along with The Deadly Truth,  I want to share a series of posts regarding the various stages I went through to create it (including all the things that should have been done in another manner). In The Netherlands, I met with fellow animation enthusiast Voynitsky, so in the following days you’ll see a post about our conversation and some of his work. Great guy. In the past days I’ve been getting a lot of traffic directly from gooogle, and the search terms that keep coming up are “toon backgrounds” and “animating water”, so I decided to write detailed tutorial posts on how I go about doing those two things. Even if it’s only from my amateur experience.

My purpose is to make this blog as informative and useful as possible so that animation enthusiasts everywhere can benefit from my learning process.

So, over the next couple of weeks you can expect the following:

1) Completion and release of The Deadly Truth.

2) A series of posts about The Deadly Truth’s production.

3) My conversation with Voynitsky and  some of his work.

4) Tutorials on “toon backgrounds” (indoors and outdoors) and “animating water”.

[Update:] I don’t like posts without visuals. After all , this is a blog about visual storytelling, so I want to show you the animation that got me started with this hobby back in 2006. It was done for a challenge at animationforum.net, run by Greg Kapersky. The challenge was called Dance Off and we were given a one minute piece of audio called Lalla, from the album I Have a Small Penis by M. J. Katamajäki to which we had to draw a character dancing. Go figure. I did it in Flash MX and had a lot of fun doing it, so here it is (opens in a new window):

Dance Off by Renato Vargas. (Click on the image)

I want to thank everyone that has kept coming back to this blog. It’s been great having you here. Don’t be shy, leave a comment .

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Well. In the end I had too little time left for The Deadly Truth before my day job took me to Holland, so I had to leave things as they were, but to tell you the not so deadly truth, I can´t complain. This is a gorgeous country, no matter where you look. I thought I’d show you what I’ve been up to and get back to animation once I’m back home (June 29).

We are staying in Tilburg, which is a city close to Belgium, but before we got here we spent one night in Wageningen, which is sort of a University town. It looks like one of those christmas decorative miniature towns. Just lovely. Here’s a view from my hotel room and one of the streets in the center city.

Our hosts at Tilburg University have been great to us and we’ve been integrated into an excellent work team. Of course not everything in this life is work… Here’s a shot of the guys. (From the far left: the all knowleadgeable Jan van Tongeren, Juan Pablo Castaneda, Ruud Picavet, Yours Truly [standing], and Pedro Pineda.)

I leave you with a shot of the view from my room at the Mercure Hotel in Tilburg’s center square. I might be getting together with two Dutch fellow Toon Boom Animate enthusiasts the following week, so I’ll let you know how that goes. I bought a sketch pad to capture some of Holland’s and London’s (over the weekend) gorgeous views, so I’ll be sharing those with you later. Til then, Doei!

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I had intended The Deadly Truth to be released yesterday, but I’m going to wait a couple of days. Although the animation is done, there are a couple of aspects that need a little attention before its release. First of all, I’m wrestling with a couple of effects. I thought that was going to be easy, but since I’m still learning the software I cannot get them to look exactly how I wanted them to. I’m gonna do some experimenting tonight. Then, there’s the sound issue. It’s a very short clip (around one min in length), but I want it to sound good. Last night, I dusted off my microphone and did a few tests with the new comp, and it’s all set. I just need to start recording. Last but not least, I want to share more with you, so I’m going to be writing a series of how-to posts that will describe every part of the process and how to get each of them accomplished with Toon Boom Animate. They are going to be really cool. I want to have the first one ready when the clip airs.  So now I’m not going to give you a release date, but instead I’m going to say that you can expect it soon. Have a great day!

Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Now that things are back to normal, here’s a quick update of The Deadly Truth. This link takes you to a facebook version of the video that looks better than Youtube’s. While you are there, you can always befriend me.

Here’s the Youtube one, which for some reason is one second shorter than it should be. Just a taste:

Note: I’m thinking of releasing the Toon Boom Animate source files for this animation once it’s published so that everyone can learn from my mistakes, so stay tuned!