Optimizing 2D Animation Production Time in Creating Traditional Watercolor Looks by Integrating Traditional and Digital Media

Using traditional watercolor for backgrounds in digital 2D animation

Abstract

2D animation is laborious. Each frame has to be drawn individually, be it traditional or paperless/ digital animation. However, 2D animation keeps reinventing itself. With current technology in digital 2D animation, we're offered the opportunity to make hand-drawn animation in a way that we couldn't even imagine fifteen years ago with smaller team and lower budget. However we can't deny that traditional 2D animation has its own appeal which makes 2D animation more precious and memorable. That being said, each traditional and digital 2D animation has its own strengths. In this paper, I’m going to combine digital and traditional 2D animation techniques to produce a short animated movie according to their strengths in order to optimize the production time in 2D animation pipeline. Traditional media that is used in this research is watercolor. Animation will be done digitally with Toon Boom Harmony software. This strategy will be tested in the production pipeline of “Rise & Shine” 2D animated short.