I do a lot of my own scenes and builds in animation, so I had a lot ready going into this. How long did production take you, end to end?Ĭondensed, this whole short took over four weeks of ten-hour workdays. Plante painted the backgrounds directly inside Harmony. I had never done it before! Screenshot from The Gate’s scenes in Toon Boom Harmony Premium. Each painting was a layer, because I was trying to find my rhythm painting in Harmony. I could fully render each scene in The Gate, including the last one, in no more than three to four minutes. With painting in Harmony and using mesh warps, there was no render loss. There’s also some parallaxing with the BG as the camera comes in. That last shot was more in a 3d space anyways. I could tweak it on the fly easily because the BMPs were so light, which helped me get this short done on time.
I cheated that big time there’s three different switches of the BT in there and I just put a mesh warp on it. Especially the last shot when the camera follows him into the grave. It was a happy little accident realizing how easily you can manipulate stuff. It was a huge learning experience on my end and something I never would have foreseen. Everything that I did in The Gate had an alpha channel that was so light, and I could manipulate it so easily, that I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes, we have these backgrounds on the shows we’re working on, and they can slow down the scene because they’re so big. The compression technology in Toon Boom on those BMPs is amazing. I think they’re used to seeing the vector side and they don’t know that you can switch every element to a BMP. People on my Instagram say that they’ve always wanted to see horror animated, which is great, but also that they can’t believe I painted The Gate in Toon Boom. Mercury Filmworks’ interview with Shane Plante, following the release of The Gate.Īnd you did absolutely everything in Harmony? There’s no deeper meaning - I just really wanted to take a risk and try horror. I was going from the perspective of what you don’t see in animation. Also, I wanted to try showing suffering in animation. Right away, I realized I had never seen anyone animate anything about a grave robber. Christopher Walken was sitting on a gravestone and the camera was going up, and I was like, “Wow, that would be really cool to animate.” Boom! The idea for The Gate came from that camera angle, one shot, and has nothing to do with dialogue in the scene. But then I got really into watching a clip of Christopher Walken in The Prophecy.
I was actually going to do something that was underwater as my first idea. I wanted to try something I’d never seen before and to take a risk. Other than classic horror films, what references did you pull from as you conceived and created The Gate? We have a couple licenses for Harmony 21 and really want me to play around with it, because word on the street is the painting tools and brushes have been revamped.
#Cartoons made with toon boom studio software
There’s something about painting in this software that I can’t get over. Painting in Harmony is actually a new hobby for me now. I wanted to test the boundaries and see if I could paint something with depth and tie everything together in Harmony. Everything you saw in The Gate was done in Toon Boom there was no outside software. I knew I put my all into it, but you never really know if it’s going to work or have the punch you want it to. Shane Plante: Horror can be very unforgiving, and I didn’t know if it hit home until it was done. The Gate is a 2d-animated horror short, by Shane Plante, about finding things that should have remained forgotten.Ĭartoon Brew: How do you feel looking back at The Gate now that it’s out in the world? We caught up with Plante to discover how he used Toon Boom Harmony to bring his vision to life - or death, as the case may be.
#Cartoons made with toon boom studio professional
With The Gate, he was able to combine his professional experience animating shorts with his personal love for horror, creating something that is rarely seen in mainstream animation: terror. An animator at the Ottawa-based studio for the last 14 years, he is a self-described “jack of all trades but master of none” who has worked largely on Mickey Mouse shorts, alongside other projects. Working as part of the Mercury Shorts program, Plante created the entirety of The Gate using Toon Boom Harmony (including the backgrounds!). He brought his sensibility for scares to his latest short, The Gate. Mercury Filmworks’ senior animator Shane Plante has a taste for these ingredients of fright, having a lifelong appreciation for the genre. Great horror storytelling shares key elements - fear, revulsion, surprise, and terror - which allow a scene to become truly haunting.
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