Shred through your next production with Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22

28 September 2022

Mouse, the hero of The Duke's Game and Harmony 22's demo video.

MONTREAL – Toon Boom Animation released Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22, bringing new features and improved performance to their industry-leading tools for animation and storyboarding. Storyboard Pro is a versatile pre-production suite relied on by directors, artists and editors to structure sequences, refine visual storytelling, and pitch stories on their own terms; the largest animation and game development studios around the world choose Harmony for producing the highest quality animation, setting the standard for visual storytelling. For this new release, Toon Boom Animation commissioned the team at Mercury Filmworks to create an original short demonstrating the full range of capabilities of both Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22.

These new releases also mark a rebrand for Toon Boom Animation, with a dynamic new logo which emphasizes movement. For the past twenty-eight years, Toon Boom Animation built its reputation on the power and creative features provided by top-of-the-line storyboarding, animation, and pipeline management software. Throughout the past decade, the organization grew to foster creativity and support client needs beyond digital applications. The new logo speaks to Toon Boom Animation’s role as an animation company which, in addition to developing innovative software, provides training and consulting services to support studios, schools, as well as clients in game development — and fosters partnerships to help those clients thrive.

The Duke’s Game, directed by Shane Plante and Collin Tsandilis for the release of Harmony 22.

Storyboard Pro 22: Where every great story begins

Storyboard Pro is the only professional-grade application built from the ground up for storyboarding. From seamless integration with screenwriting tools, to drawing thumbnails, revising storyboards, or timing an animatic with camera movement and sound, Storyboard Pro empowers creatives to quickly get their content off the ground. With the same industry-leading drawing tools users expect in Harmony, Storyboard Pro provides artists with the flexibility to either sketch scenes efficiently using shorthand or precisely draft on-model poses when needed. With a built-in multiplane camera and support for vector, bitmap and 3D assets, Storyboard Pro allows teams to plan productions, whether 2D, 3D, hybrid, or live-action.

Meanwhile, updates in Storyboard Pro 22 bring improvements to conformation with non-linear editing software, native Apple ProRes support, and new quality-of-life features, such as an audio levels monitor for composing animatics with sound. Improvements to conformation allow editors and directors to more accurately track scenes in their editing software and bring changes back into Storyboard Pro, such as revisions to camera movements and timeline markers. Native support for Apple ProRes codecs results in consistency with teams working across macOS and Windows, and allows for rendering in high resolution with fewer memory limitations. The new audio levels monitor is essential for working with both scratch audio and final sound, to prevent audio clipping and more easily ensure consistent levels across a project.

Characters featured in the demo video for Harmony 22 and Storyboard Pro 22. — 2D character renders of The Duke (top), Nitro (left) and Mouse (right) from *The Duke’s Game*.

Harmony 22: Creating worlds of 2D animation

Industry artists rely on Harmony Premium’s tools and workflows at every step of the production process, from roughs to ink-and-paint as well as 2D rigged characters and compositing. The benefit to using a consistent set of tools throughout the production process is that revisions can be made at any point, without needing to import and export scenes or compromise in quality along the way. Production artists recognize that Harmony’s industry-leading drawing engine and workflow tools provide the flexibility to create animation in any style; with organic bitmap brushes, precise vector lines, a robust colour management system, an easy-to-use 3D stage and a robust multiplane camera, as well as tools for both traditional animation and rigged characters — while always offering artists the freedom to seamlessly draw special poses when needed for a scene.

Harmony 22 Premium introduces new features for artists and studios alike, including full support for HDR pipelines, improved support for Python scripting, as well as new effects for animators and compositing artists. Rendering operations are now performed using 32-bit floating point values, which not only enable native support for HDR colour and brightness values but also improve precision and performance on heavy scenes. Python scripts can now run from Harmony’s own Python Console to access and manipulate scene data, which provide technical directors with more flexibility when developing workflows tailored to their production’s needs. The animate pencil texture effect node makes it easy for artists to quickly add line boil to textured vector lines, and the new bokeh blur effect allows independent artists, as well as compositing teams of all sizes, to bring cinematic effects to their projects.

Screenshots of the bokeh blur close depth of field effect in the demo video for for Harmony 22. — Harmony 22 Premium’s new bokeh effect adds to the cinematic style of *The Duke’s Game*.

The Duke’s Game: Setting a new bar for cutout animation

To mark the release of both Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22, Toon Boom Animation commissioned the team at Mercury Filmworks to produce an original animated short film. Mercury Filmworks is an animation studio which specializes in high-quality animation made using 2D rigs, and is widely known for their work on award-winning series such as Hilda and Kid Cosmic. The new short, titled The Duke’s Game, was directed by Shane Plante and will be featured in demo scenes that users can download to learn how to use Harmony 22 Premium and Storyboard Pro 22. The team at Mercury Filmworks was given full creative freedom on the project.

“The projects that I do on my own tend to be a little darker,” added Shane Plante, a senior animator at Mercury Filmworks and director on The Duke’s Game. “There are lines that we don’t get to cross at the studio regularly, and I was a little hesitant to pitch them.”

“The only thing that we were told was a requirement was that this short needed to be about skateboarding in some form,” said Collin Tsandilis, a director at Mercury Filmworks who collaborated with Shane on the project. “We didn’t want to just have the short set at a skatepark. We wanted it to be set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”

The heroic Mouse and the robotic Nitro, characters in Harmony 22's demo video. — The heroic Mouse (left) and villainous Nitro (right) face off in *The Duke’s Game*.

The short film makes use of 2D character rigs for The Duke, Nitro and Mouse; Master Controllers on both characters and the hoverboards; a 3D environment inside Storyboard Pro and Harmony Premium; as well as scenes composited using Harmony Premium’s new bokeh effect node. In addition to storyboarding and directing the short, Shane also voiced the Duke and provided the guitar track which accompanies the film, making use of the new audio monitoring tools in Storyboard Pro 22. With help from artists at Mercury Filmworks, this new short sets a benchmark for what can be accomplished in Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22, and demonstrates tools that artists have at their disposal to produce stunning animated sequences of their own.

What’s new in Storyboard Pro 22:

Apple ProRes codec support. With increasingly demanding high quality video requirements Storyboard Pro brings consistency across platforms and allows rendering in high resolution without running into memory limitations.
Improved conformation with NLE software. Bring camera movements to your NLE software, allowing for non-destructive changes on your timeline.
Audio levels monitor. visually monitor audio output levels in order to prevent audio clipping as well as ensure consistent audio levels throughout the production pipeline.

Read the full release notes for Storyboard Pro 22.

What’s new in Harmony 22:

HDR rendering with 32-bits per channel. Render operations in Harmony can now be performed using 32-bit floating point values. This means more precision, better accuracy and support for colour values below 0 and above 1 for high dynamic range (HDR) rendering.
Python scripting. Python scripting can now run natively from Harmony’s own Python Console to access and manipulate scene data. If you need to leverage JavaScript API functionalities, the new Python Console also interacts with the existing JavaScript/Python bridge.
Bokeh Blur effect. The Bokeh Blur effect added to Harmony Premium’s Effects Library simulates how a camera lens blurs elements out of focus based on the shape of its iris. An alpha depth matte can be added to this new blur effect to determine the amount of blur a desired area of the image will receive and, in so doing, simulate depth of field.
Animate Pencil Texture Effect. Want to make vector lines look hand-drawn by simulating a line boil? Harmony 22 Premium has a new node for that, with controls for adjusting the random offset and stretching applied to your pencil line’s texture.

Read the full release notes for Harmony 22.

Interested in storyboarding or animating a 180 heelflip with the latest and greatest releases of Toon Boom Animation’s software? Licenses for Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22 are available for purchase on Toon Boom Animation’s website. Users with ongoing annual or monthly licenses can find the latest updates in their accounts under Downloads. Storyboard Pro 22 and Harmony 22 are compatible with Windows and macOS, with native support for Intel and Apple Silicon devices. Curious about where to start? Artists can download free 21-day trials for Storyboard Pro and Harmony Premium, with no credit card required, and find free training resources on the Toon Boom Learn Portal.

Nitro, the antagonist of the Harmony 22 demo video. — Nitro, the undefeated champion and antagonist of *The Duke’s Game*.

About Toon Boom Animation Inc:

Toon Boom Animation Inc.’s award-winning software is the global standard for animation, storyboarding and pipeline management. Storyboard Pro and Harmony solutions provide everyone from enthusiasts to professionals with the artistic freedom to create in any style and efficiently publish anywhere, while Producer provides real-time management for animated projects. Customers who chose Toon Boom animation software for the development and creation of their productions include Disney Television Animation, Amazon, Fox Television Animation, Nelvana, Toei Animation, The SPA Studios, Xilam and Boulder Media, to name a few. The technology is currently available in English, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. For more information, visit: toonboom.com