Hello all! This isn't a update on Wonders of the Universe, because nothing really has changed since our last news post.

Our last Toonwerks news post

But since then I've decided to help with the animation process for Wonders Episode 3 alongside Casey and Chris. Before this, I had already started to get back into animation with the Wonders "Meet Lin'zee" short a couple weeks prior. But working on a actual EPISODE was daunting. Luckily, a few things really helped out getting the hang of the art of cartooning again.

First off, Episode 3 of Wonders is being animated by someone who's not Mark. By that very nature it will look different than the ones that he worked on before. Mark puts an incredible amount of detail in his work. Not to say me, Chris and Casey don't take a lot of care into what we do... but when I think of putting that much detail into movements I start to go a bit nuts! We're all actually pretty similar when it comes to our technique though. So I'm hoping it will be fairly seamless when you all watch it.

I did try to copy things Mark had in the other episodes... Things like how he moves the body when talking and the inclusion of blinks. And I think we all agree that animating the new character Rüt2 is tons of fun!

The second thing that helped me is the way Mark had used nested graphics for nearly everything. That means every character on screen is about 3 separate symbols deep. The top one holds everything, the middle one has character animation, and the 3rd is the face that has lip sync and face movements. It makes it very easy to change and tweak things after animation is done. It's not a NEW process, but a big step up from the way I did things in the past.

I've also been using easing more... which is both great and a pain in the butt for the more complex movements. I'm sure Mark has a process down for it all, but I'm still getting getting used to it all. And looking back to my older work, it's a big improvement.

Anyway, as it stands, I'm almost done with the scene I'm working on, and I'll probably be doing another as well. (the first and final scene) And after all this is done, it's back to work on the short!

Speaking of the short, here's a shot of it that was posted on our Facebook page!

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