Changes: Animation

Revision as of 07:26, 7 May 2021

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is an animated series. It differs from most animated series by having another stage between the storyboard and animation stages, called the layout stage, which details the key poses, composition, and color balancing of a scene more than the storyboards. Some samples of the animation process of the show were posted on YouTube but were subsequently taken down.

Animation process

Friendship is Magic is animated with Flash 8, in conjunction with many third-party and proprietary customizations, many of which are developed by co-director James Wootton. There are three animation crews, one in Canada and two in the Philippines. Each crew works on three episodes concurrently; each episode is staggered by a week from the others. An episode takes several weeks to animate at the same time with the other episodes, not including scripting, storyboarding, and voice recording, which are done beforehand.

Like classic cartoon shows, episodes are storyboarded in addition to being scripted to facilitate the visual aspect of the animation. The storyboard artists have a month to board an entire episode. The show is distinct from most other animated shows for having a layouts stage, which details the action more thoroughly than the storyboards, with respect to key poses, composition, and color balancing. The storyboards and layouts are done prior to the actual animation by the studio's leading artists. The layouts are turned into an animatic, and then an animator works from the animatic, taking several days to a week to animate a one-minute scene.

With the exception of the musical shorts, which are still done by DHX, the My Little Pony Equestria Girls: Summertime Shorts are animated by Hasbro-owned Irish animation studio Boulder Media Limited.

The Movie is animated with Toon Boom Harmony.^[1]

Linework

The characters in the series have colored outlines of varying thickness. The show's creator and original character designer, Lauren Faust, notes that this is both a stylistic and a technical choice. From a stylistic viewpoint, the colored character outlines "soften" the characters whose colors would otherwise sharply contrast with bold black outlines. From a technical viewpoint, colored character outlines fell to disuse with the advent of the Xerox process. Before the Xerox process, linework from sketches was copied and manually painted onto sheets of celluloid, which allowed for colored outlines. The Xerox process replaced manual painting with machine copying, which resulted in black, "scratchy" lines. Faust said she feels lucky to be able to use colorful outlines, because it reminds her of classic Disney movies that were made before the advent of the Xerox process. The show's linework has intricate line width tapering, which Faust credits to the hard work of its directors Jayson Thiessen and James Wootton who managed to properly animate the tapered lines on the show's animation software platform, Flash.

Crew

See also: credits and crew

Lauren Faust held the titles of developer and executive producer in season one. Rob Renzetti served as the story editor for the first two seasons. Meghan McCarthy held that title for seasons three and four, as well as episodes three and four and the second half of season five. M.A. Larson was story editor for the first half of season five, excluding episodes three and four, while Josh Haber served as story editor for season six. Currently, writing partners Joanna Lewis and Kristine Songco jointly hold the title. Frequently, the show's crew visits the larger fan-sites and answers questions about the show.

YouTube showreels

Evolution of a Scene

Evolution of a Scene is a series of behind-the-scenes videos by an animator from Top Draw, the Philippine studio which handles some of the show's animation. The videos present one or two unfinished incarnations of a scene and the finished scene, and briefly detail changes that were made to the animation during production. Some videos contain short animated scenes that use character models and backgrounds from the production, but were specifically put together for the video, for instance a walk cycle of Granny Smith in front of various backgrounds.

A seventh and final video was announced, but has not so far been released. All of the other videos were pulled from YouTube in early October 2011.

Videos

Fluttershy calming the bunnies, from The Cutie Mark Chronicles
Spike laughing at Twilight, from Winter Wrap Up
Granny Smith running away [defunct link], from Griffon the Brush Off
Rarity seeing Opal on the tree, from Suited For Success
Pinkie Pie having the hiccups, from Griffon the Brush Off
Rarity designing her dress [defunct link], from Suited For Success

Gallery

My MLP season 1 scenes

My MLP season 1 scenes, shortened to MLP scenes season 1 from the eighth installment onward, is another series of videos by another animator from Top Draw. The videos present unfinished incarnations of scenes.

All of the videos were pulled from YouTube following the leak of the Smile Song. On his YouTube profile, the animator wrote the following (since removed): "Attention, due to the recent scandal of the leakage of MLP season 2 scenes and music may that leaker rot its soul; I must delete all my videos to avoid legal repercussions."

Videos

From The Ticket Master; contains two unused shots
From Friendship is Magic, part 1
From Griffon the Brush Off
From Boast Busters
From Look Before You Sleep
From Bridle Gossip
From Winter Wrap Up
From Call of the Cutie
From Suited For Success; contains an unused shot, and includes in its description "Finally sorry but i made a slipped up there and cause a bit of stir where the pony on the right (near spike's chin) have this tattoo '71' written on it, I didnt see it because of the lag until its too late, im not gonna say what it meant I ot even sure i have to divulge what its suppose to be"[sic]
From Feeling Pinkie Keen
From Stare Master
From The Show Stoppers

Galleries

General animation image gallery

Lauren Faust image gallery

References

↑ Michel Gagné (2016-10-09). Bellingham's Nik Gipe Joins Me on MLP Movie. Retrieved on 2016 October 12.

Q&A session with layout artist "Flashinthepan", 4chan, 2010-11-28
Q&A session with layout artist "Flashinthepan", 4chan, 2010-12-10
Q&A with Sabrina Alberghetti, Equestria Daily, 2011-09-02
Jayson Thiessen interview, Equestria Daily (audio), 2011-09-13
Lauren Faust season one retrospective Q&A, Equestria Daily, 2011-09-16
PonyCon 2016 Character Development Panel with Lauren Faust. YouTube (2016-02-18). Retrieved on 2016 March 12.

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-And now it will.</big>
 ''[[My Little Pony Friendship is Magic]]'' is an [[Wikipedia:Animation|animated]] series. It differs from most animated series by having another stage between the storyboard and animation stages, called the layout stage, which details the key poses, composition, and color balancing of a scene more than the storyboards. Some samples of the animation process of the show were posted on YouTube but were subsequently taken down.