My journey into animation started with my general studies, which I pursued at home in Denmark. Could you start by sharing with us your animation background?Ībsolutely.

The tavern scene, produced for Toon Boom’s remote training course on paperless animation. We caught up with Mik to learn about his journey into paperless animation, and how he approached animating the example scene below. Below is a commissioned example of that scene, which was animated by Mik Kirchheiner, an animator and story artist from Denmark.

In the final project, students apply every concept they learned in the course by animating a portion of a complete scene, including dialogue and lip sync. Toon Boom’s remote training course on paperless animation provides an introduction to paperless concepts, guiding students through everything from how to use Harmony’s workflows for rough animation, cleanup and colouring to looping, layering and prop interaction. Whether you animate on paper or use a graphics tablet, the same basic principles of animation apply.

One recent example of ‘tradigital’ paperless animation was Sergio Pablos’ film Klaus (2019), which was animated using Toon Boom Harmony. Where once every frame of a character’s movement was drawn on paper, and then inked on cels or scanned into software for the final ink and paint, animation is now more often done directly using digital graphics tablets. Paperless animation is the modern approach to hand-drawn animation.

Toon boom harmony tutorial