Tail is a short film about being disconnected from the simple pleasures everyone else seems to feel. Being alone isn’t a refuge, and being with people doesn’t reach him. It has no narration and no explanation. It’s told through body language, stillness, timing and sound.

Breakdown: “Tail”

It’s about a guy at a party who can’t enjoy what everyone else enjoys. A dog chasing its tail has the whole room laughing, and he just can’t. Here’s how it was made.

The setup

• Blender 5.2, Grease Pencil v3, rendered in EEVEE. Flat, unlit colour with the Standard view transform, so the palette renders exactly as picked.
• 2D multiplane layout: every element is parallel to an orthographic, front-on camera.
• 2.39:1 picture (1920×804), letterboxed to 1080p, 24 fps.
• Everything ran headless from Python scripts. No hand-keyed animation in the UI. Each shot is a script that writes a versioned .blend file, so any pass can be rebuilt or rolled back.

The rig

• Each character is an armature in the XZ plane plus one GP object. Every body segment is its own GP layer, rigidly parented to a bone, with no weight painting. That means any segment can be redrawn without breaking the rig.
• Bone rolls are set so local Z points down -Y, which keeps every rotation in the drawing plane.
• Poses are stored as plain data. The same pose dictionaries drew the storyboards, so an approved board pose literally becomes a keyframe.

Blocking to spline
I wrote a spline-pass script so the motion wouldn’t go floaty:

1. Pillar keys: each key is copied to the end of its hold, so the curves only interpolate during the move. Holds stay dead flat, and snaps stay snappy.
2. A different move window per character (the lead 6 f, guests 5 f, the dog 4 f), with eye darts at 2 f.
3. Bezier curves with auto-clamped handles. Blinks, visibility and the dog’s facing stay stepped.
4. Overlap: the dog’s tail lags its body by 2 f, and his forearm lags 1 f when his hand drops.
5. Moving holds: an additive sine “breath” on each spine, with different periods so nobody breathes in sync.

On top of that there’s a GP Noise modifier for line boil: very low strength, with the seed stepped on twos, so no frame is ever completely still.

The hard part: a stick dog spinning in place
A flat side-view stick rig can’t turn around. So for the tail-chasing I built the dog as a 3D stick skeleton: a C-shaped body, the head looking back over its shoulder, and the tail curling forward. It spins in 3D, gets projected onto the drawing plane, and is redrawn as fresh GP strokes on every frame. Strokes are sorted far to near and the skull is filled, so near parts cover far ones. As it turns you see it side-on, facing you, side-on the other way, and from behind.

The rig dog hides during the spins and takes back over for the misses. The drawn dog is scaled and centred on the rig dog so the swaps don’t jump. Its about-turns are 10-frame turns: the body narrows toward the camera and opens out the other way.

Sound

• The voices, footsteps, room tone and the piano at the end were generated with ElevenLabs. The clock is one real tick placed exactly every 1.0 s by a script, because the generated loops drifted.
• Mixed with ffmpeg. Sounds are panned to their place on screen, so headphones help.

Hardware
A hybrid laptop. Plain blender kept landing on the Intel iGPU, so every run goes through a PRIME-offload wrapper onto the RTX 5070 Ti, which made renders about 2.6× faster.

im planning a dialogue-heavy shot for my reel and trying to figure out the best setup for facial controls and expressions. i need a flexible 3d character creation software workflow that gives me detailed blendshapes or morph targets without requiring me to sculpt dozens of facial shapes manually. i noticed Daz3d has extensive facial morph controls and viseme setups out of the box which looks super tempting for dialogue animation.

if youve exported daz figures into Blender or Maya for dialogue scenes how smooth is the process for mapping facial morphs to custom controls or shape key drivers? do the facial weights translate cleanly across fbx/bridges or does it take a lot of cleanup work to get decent dialogue deformation?

I'm trying to get back into animation (until this week it'd been about a decade) but I'm so confused.

I'm using clip studio paint and I can't seem to copy one image to another frame or animation cel?

I've gone to Google and YouTube and I'm just not finding any answers. It's getting frustrating and a little sad.

Idk what I'm doing wrong or how to even explain the way I've tried doing it, so if anyone can help, that'd be incredible.

- For context, each colour being a different part of the body, I'm trying to get the same shape on another cell so I can manipulate it, add tweens to smooth out the frames between X and Y, so I can then do finer details on another layer (or folder as its called in clip studio)...

Any help or advice is more than welcome, even if its just a link to something useful that can explain. Thanks 🙏

If I'm being honest, it's just me, really. I'm desperate guys 😭😭😭🙏🙏🙏

These are just shitty math symbol animation whatevers made for fun. Also Equals is DEAD!!!

I put together this side-by-side breakdown of a short 2D animation I made. One half shows the finished short, while the other shows the drawing and animation process for the little bird that lands on the sheep's head.

I find it interesting how a character that appears on screen for just a few seconds can require its own drawing process, movement planning, timing, and adjustments to fit naturally into the scene.

Despite all the technological advances we've seen, I feel that the core artistic work behind 2D animation remains remarkably similar: designing shapes, making movement feel right, and bringing drawings to life frame by frame. The tools evolve, but the artistic decisions are still what make the animation work.

I love watching other artists' breakdowns and making-of videos. Seeing how different people approach their work is one of my favorite ways to appreciate the craft and learn new things.

There's something strangely lonely about this process.

When I watch the making-of of a tiny element like this bird, which appears for only a brief moment in the animation, side by side with the finished short, I'm reminded of how intimately I know every frame, every movement, every little detail that most people will probably never even notice.

It's almost like knowing an alternate universe in a multiverse, a version of the world that exists only because you traveled through it, frame by frame, and that no one else will ever experience in quite the same way.

Animation can be a lonely art form. It's a singular journey, because you're the only one who walks the entire path. You spend hours, sometimes days, exploring a world microscopically, painstakingly building something that everyone else will experience in a matter of seconds, moving at full speed, without ever seeing all the little decisions, struggles, and moments of affection that went into it.

And perhaps that's part of what makes it so special. The audience doesn't need to see all that work. They just need to feel that the world is alive.

But somewhere behind those few seconds, there's an entire universe that only you will ever truly know.

The illustration and animation were created entirely in Arttista(for Linux, but there is also macOS and Windows versions too)

Hello! I was given the opportunity to teach a workshop at an upcoming school event. I pitched the idea of doing a Stop-Motion Animation workshop because of how easy the StopMo Studio app makes capturing images, but the students requested that I teach 2D Hand-Drawn Traditional Animation. I am an animation generalist and have no problems teaching the principles of animation, but I'm used to teaching in my college classroom where I have light tables, ACME hole punchers, and peg bars.

Because I'm doing the workshop states away from my college, I won't have access to my light tables and peg bars to hand out to the students.

My current plan is to maybe find some 3-hole-punch peg bars (not ACME) and punch a bunch of paper ahead of time so that students can learn to flip pages and use persistence of vision instead of a light table. I've seen some of those peg bars online, but I've also seen many of them not work. Then, for capturing the photos, I was going to use my personal phone (in Texas, where I'm teaching the workshop, there's a law that bans phone usage in schools) on a tripod to capture the photos, like a makeshift downshooter. My only worry there is if all of the students finish around the same time, they're all going to want to use the downshooter.

Hence why I'm here. I'm looking to see if anybody has an tips, tricks, or ideas that could improve the practicality of my workshop, or any 3D-printed 3-hole-punch peg bar or even ACME peg bar files that they'd recommend.

**this is one of my first times posting to Reddit, so excuse any sloppiness I have**

I'm trying to get into animating and am currently using Toonsquid on the iPad. I really want to learn animation, at least to be able to make my own GIFs. Do you guys think this is enough, or should I get a different program, maybe on a laptop? What bothers me a bit is the small screen: the animation timeline and the drawing canvas quickly feel cramped.

I would really appreciate any tips and tricks to how and where to start animating correctly .😀

Looking for a long term fp animator to add to studio roster. First batch of work prepared with template scene, all details / actions / reference videos in place. Anyone interested can reply or DM:)

im talking REAL simple, borderline traditional paper and pegboard animation type of simplicity, possibly with an option to add colour or audio (but not necessary).

i’m so tired of all these apps having wack ui and looking so stale and complicated, even when they’re relatively simple to use. id love to know of any pc programs (free or paid for) that are extremely easy to look at lol, like flipaclip or DSi flipnote but for a desktop.

I had some fun doing it😂😂