animatics 

Rescue Bots Academy

This was a fantastic character reversal during this episode of Rescue Bots Academy. Throughout the ep, Hoist was trying to deal with his crippling fear of Dinobots (see Grimlock the giant T-Rex Dinobot).

Grimlock was such a fun character to introduce and we just loved this dynamic between himself and Hoist. This sequence was particularly fun because we were able to juxtapose Grimlock’s bravado and brawn with this terrified shriek and reveal that he is terrified of cats - even more-so than Hoist of Dinobots.

As you can see, the board artist did a fantastic job with the expressions of the characters. However, as is often the challenge with a series that is based around multiple main characters, we had some issues with character placement throughout the sequence. So when it came to animation, we had to move the characters around a bit to ensure that the shots were hooking up properly in a geographical sense.

MLP Equestria Girls Summer Shorts

This was a super fun project overall, and this episode was probably my favourite of the 10 shorts we made.

Our board artist did a fantastic job, which is why you can see very little difference in the shots between the animatic and the final comped scenes.

The only slight issue we ran into was at the end, where Rainbow Dash is peering over the edge of the cupboard in the animatic. When we got to animating this scene, it seemed like the angle didn’t work for her to be hiding behind the edge. It looked more like she was coming up out of the cupboard. So instead, as she is engrossed in her book, we had her slowly lowering the book and looking a bit more embarrassed. We felt this worked better with the overall flow of the sequence.