Process

I used the illustration from Website launch as a basis, since it was cleaned up in OpenToonz. I zoomed in the camera, took the background out, and redrew the head as well as add some claw detail.

The animation is almost entirely based off of moving the head as a whole, and then warping the wings by putting them on separate layers and keyframing their skew factors. The only part that required warping the strokes and some redrawing was the neck. So I didn’t need to sketch out the rough animation beforehand, I just went straight to clean animation.

This was the first time I really dove into keyframe animation in OpenToonz. Frustratingly, OpenToonz won’t let you skew a selection of lines, like you can in Toon Boom Harmony, or most good art programs for that matter. So I had to put the two wings in separate layers and use the skew transform on the layers themselves as a workaround (which it will let you do).

For a while I was trying to figure out what song I should put as I’m wingbanging. I have extremely weird music tastes and I didn’t want to pick something that was too weird for most. Of course the music excerpt would have been kept very short. But I realized that it wasn’t technically necessary, so the final result is completely silent. And that’s probably for the better.