One of Jonathan's favorite hobbies is creating animated short films. From developing a storyboard, to finding music and reference material, animating characters, rendering backgrounds/scenes and adding ‘special effects’. It's a long process, but so much fun!! Enjoy his most recent animated short Enchanted Forest Waltz and read below to see how it was done. 
STORYBOARD AND CONCEPTS
It all begins with an idea. THEN A STORYBOARD IS DEVELOPED to visualize the animation sequence. Not only is the story and flow of the animated short outlined during this step, but planing for visual effects and color can also begin.
FRAME BY FRAME
Each scene was digitally drawn then animated frame by frame using various techniques including rotoscoping. Because the drawings were done digitally, often frames could be duplicated and subtle changes made to the piece of the drawing that required movement. This sped up the process of animating the assets IN TOTAL THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF DIGITAL DRAWING THAT MAKE UP THE SHORT FILM and the entire process took over 120 hours.
LOOPING AND TRANSPARENCY
Though hundreds upon hundreds of frames were created, the ability to loop the animations, and make them transparent (no backgrounds) sped up the animating process. Backgrounds were then created separately.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Once the animations, backgrounds, foregrounds and other renderings for a scene were complete, everything was brought into a program called After Effects. The backgrounds, foregrounds and animated assets were organized into layers at specific distances to create a realistic parallax effect. Lights could then be introduced into the scene and given specific instructions at given times (flicker every 5 seconds, etc.). A camera was then placed and given various tasks throughout each scene (zoom in on this character at 20 seconds, etc.).
