I animated this dance sequence in Toon Boom Harmony, starting with the rough
pencil animation. Something I intended to get right early on with the pencil test was the physics and follow through of the protagonist’s hair. To achieve this, as I drew the keyframes of the character’s motion in the frame, I added in visual lines of motion following their figure and used this as a reference. I also used the onionskin to see the pathway that the hair was taking order to draw the next frame (see fig. a)
In iterating this sequence, I mde several versions of the pencil animation at various stages of having more inbetweens added in, refined and adjusted. Something that I went back over in iterations, for example, was the hair movement. In the initial pencil animations, I focused on the protagonist’s body to get the general sense of their position in space. With this more consolidated after a couple of iterations, I added in the hair and found that I would add more volume or length to it on certain arcs of motion
During the clean up stage of the character animation, I found that a good way to further emphasise the dynamic movement of the protagonist flying around through the air was to use Pegs to enhance their motion (see fig. b). Using Pegs became a regular practice over this production, and I found that the easiest way to apply them was to
> right click on the layer
>Hover on [Insert]
>Insert Parent Peg
