What is coming in 2024
Here are a few things that will be coming in 2024 and beyond...
As we begin 2024 and look ahead, we are excited to be constantly adding new material to existing courses that are currently available, as well as make plans for new courses that will be created in the years beyond 2024.
I am excited to finally be bringing completion to my Animating With OpenToonz course!
The course is currently still available at an introductory discount.
This is a course I have been wanting to create ever since I started working with OpenToonz over 4 years ago. I began work on it early in 2023, and I am excited to be finally bringing it to it's completion in 2024.
Because it is still incomplete, it is available currently at at 40% discount (full price will eventually be $50).
Part 1 is complete, and Part 2 is being finalised now. Another, 3rd part, may be added at a later stage, but once the first 2 parts are complete, some additional content will be added, and the course will be complete. I hope this will take place over the first few months of 2024.
However, there is currently enough material in the course to get you going on your OpenToonz journey, so if you think you would want it (and why wouldn't you), then take advantage and secure the course at this discounted price before it is complete and goes to full price in the next few months.
It is going to be a great course, so please do yourself a favour and secure yours whilst this discount is available, as once the course is 100% complete this discount will forever fall away.
What is OpenToonz
A brief history
I came across OpenToonz years ago whilst looking at another great animation platform, “TV Paint”.
I was watching a lot of Studio Ghibli films at the time, and got to learn that they had made many of their movies using something called Toonz.
So I started to look into Toonz.
Toonz was a 2D animation platform built by an Italian company, Digital Video S.P.A. in Rome, Italy, in 1993. So the original version has been around now for 30 years. Yet it is still not that well known in the animation industry, which is more familiar with Flash, ToonBoom and perhaps TVPaint.
Toonz was customised for the legendary animation house, Studio Ghibli, and when it was released as an Open Source product by Dwango of Japan, it was known as the “Studio Ghibli Edition”, because of all the customisation that was created for Ghibli.
Ghibli used Toonz for many of their most well known movies, including “Spirited Away”, “Princess Monoke”, “My Neighbors the Yamadas” and “Howl’s Moving Castle”
However it wasn’t only Studio Ghibli who were producing world class animation with Toonz, other studios were developing games with it, and TV series, for example Rough Draft produced Matt Groening’s early “Futurama” & “Steven Universe” with it - MTV produced “The Maxx” and Fox produced “Anastasia”. All used Toonz at one stage in their production. Even Steven Spielberg’s animation company Amblimation used Toonz to create “Balto” back in 1995.
So Toonz was a big deal, used by some of the big names on major productions.
Then at the end of March, 2016 - Japanese publisher Dwango acquired the Toonz software from Digital Video, and released it as an Open Source product, called OpenToonz.
Their intention was “to make Toonz a world standard for 2D animation,” said Claudio Mattei, managing director of Digital Video.
The news was a BIG deal in animation back in 2016.
Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi wrote at the time:
“The announcement of OpenToonz comes at a time when animation is experiencing the biggest boom period in its history. However, many of the young artists in these regions (South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East) do not have the resources to invest in proprietary software. That’s especially why we view OpenToonz, a free professional-grade 2D animation software, as a complete and total gamechanger for the animation industry moving forward. The animation floodgates just opened.
That is the back story to this amazingly powerful free software called OpenToonz.
Animating with OpenToonz
Why take this course?
Whether you are just starting out in animation and you are looking for an easy yet powerful FREE animation platform to learn and perfect your craft, or you are a proficient animator and just want to expand your skill set and experience, and maybe want to see what is possible in another animation platform, Animating With OpenToonz is for you.
In this course I to take you step by step through the many tools and methods available in OpenToonz to create animation work of an extremely high quality.
I will also show you specifically what I use, and how I use it to create my animated work in OpenToonz, taking you into the creation of many scenes of some of my latest work, created in OpenToonz.
The Big Cat Course
How to create and animate the Big Cats
I think this course is going to be great, and I am excited to have it in my pipeline of work for the future. 
It will cover how to design and create big cat (Lions, Tigers, Leopards, Pumas and Cheetahs) characters and how to get them to move with feline grace.
It will cover things like the anatomy of a (big) cat, the various big cats and how they differ and are alike, how to create big cats to animate, then after an intensive study of the various big cat gaits (walks, runs etc) and moves (leaps etc) we will bring in the Templates designed for the course, and get the big cats you have created, animated.
Big cats are incredibly popular in animation (think Jungle Book, Lion King etc) and to be able to create incredible big cat animation will only add to your skills as an animator.
I will be animating a few big cats in my short "The Painter On Safari", and we will be using a lot of the material from this animated movie in the course.
Like all my courses, this course will come with Templates to help you get your Big Cats moving straight away.
Just download the Templates and use them as shown in the course, and you can have your feline creations moving with feline fluidity in no time at all.
One to look out for.
I hope to have it available in the next year or so, watch this space.
Creating great backgrounds
Backgrounds are so essential to any animation, and this course will cover this key element.
Backgrounds are so essential to any animation, that it is worth devoting a whole course on how to create better backgrounds!
If you are looking for one area in your animation to improve on, and lift your whole animation game, you can do worse than focusing on your backgrounds. I would venture to say you can turn average animation into GREAT animation if your backgrounds are good, or even better, great!
You have to look no further than Studio Ghibli back grounds to see what a lasting effect great backgrounds can have on an audience. Essentially, they can make or break an animated movie, and they are very important.
We will dive into the essence of good background design and look at things like perspective, scale, colour, using backgrounds to move the narrative forward etc.
We will also look at the various ways and methods we can create memorable, evocative and gorgeous backgrounds, including using 3D (Blender) and unique projection techniques for textures etc.
This is a course I have wanted to make for a long time, and it will hopefully be coming out sometime in the next year or so.
Character Design
Design appealing and interesting characters
Perhaps this is one course we should have started with, as character design is key to any animation project.
In this course we will look at the methods the animator can go through to create imaginative, original and appealing characters to populate animated films.
A lot goes into character design, and we will cover it all in this course.
We hope to have this course out in 2024.
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This is NOT the end of the road!
And we aren't monkeying about either!
This isn't the end of the road as far as our offerings and content are concerned. We have SO MUCH coming in the weeks, months and years ahead, so watch this space - even better, sign up for a course or at the very least leave your details below so we can keep you up to date with new material and courses etc. that we will be adding into the future.
We don't monkey about here at James Whitelaw Animation - we take this stuff very seriously, and we take your support and time very seriously too, so we won't bug you with unnecessary emails etc - we will just let you know what's new, what's coming up and what you can expect in the future.