Welcome to Digital Art!

I'm super excited to be part of this class! I hope I can become even more adept at digital art, and learn important skills I can use later down the road. :D

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Some digital culture that I love is animation, especially 2D animation. My favorite examples of this are the animation done by one particular studio, Flying Bark Productions. A show/movie that is an amazing example of this is "Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Not only do me and my little sister love to watch it together, but it also has some absolutely beautiful animation.

Here is a video compilation (if anyone wants to see it) of some of the amazing animation from just the first two seasons of the show. But what is most impressive to me, besides the dynamic poses, exaggerated emotion, and beautiful colors, are shots with a lot of camera motion.

Like this one,

this one,

and lastly this one, from the first episode.

The impressive thing about this animation, and these shots in particular, is that the show is drawn frame-by-frame. Instead of utilizing puppets like most mainstream animation, each frame is individually drawn by hand, and it makes me wonder how they manage to animate the characters and settings so beautifully consistent and fluently.

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Speculation:

I'm pretty sure that Flying Bark Productions uses Toon-Boom, and draw each frame individually. Maybe they actually do utilize puppets to animate certain shots, as to keep the characters on model, however they also exaggerate these limbs heavily to make extreme camera angles, so it's unclear. I'm also curious as to how they make moving shots with huge camera movements, do they have to draw each different frame of the background, or many different backgrounds that seamlessly blend together? Maybe they even used rotoscoping with shots where the camera is rotating around a character? However Flying Bark Productions make these shots, it speak for themselves, as the final products look absolutely beautiful.