Ryo & Dakota Animatic
An animation of a scene from the comic Ryo & Dakota
ART DIRECTION, SOUND DESIGN, SCREENWRITING, ANIMATION
Objective
Create an animation of choice.
Process
The scene that I chose to animate was from Chapter 3 of my comic, where Ryo, the male lead in the comic and Dakota’s classmate, saves Dakota, the female lead and love interest, from a truck that ignores a stop sign while she’s crossing the street.
The majority of this animation was done frame-by-frame in ToonSquid, with a few effects and keyframe moves. I chose to keep the animation in a sketchy, pencil-textured style in order to speed up the animation process — but I used color selectively in order to emphasize the climax of the scene.
For the audio, I was lucky enough to get two very talented voices to play my characters. I conducted recording sessions with the both of them — together and separately — and then spliced the audio together to match the pacing of my storyboarding. During the animating process, the video and audio recordings were used as references to match their phonetics.
Finally, I collected the perfect free sound effects from online and adjusted all the audio with Adobe Audition, Premier Pro, and After Effects in order to give it the feel of professional-grade recordings. The final render was composed in Adobe After Effects.
My wonderful voice actors, Evie Heinley (Left, played Dakota) and Gideon Brandt (Right, played Ryo).
The pages of my comic I used as reference and preliminary storyboards (above) and stills from the final animatic (below).
Watch the final rendering of the animation below or on Youtube! (@ryo.and.dakota)
