For slow, precise animations, I decided it would be more advantageous to create them using Photoshop. There are a few reasons for this decision, a lot of which I go over in my software analysis; however, there are a few more reasons I have had since creating the character. The main one is that Klause's design in particular is actually deceivingly complicated, with several layers needed. This would be extremely difficult to animate in OpenToonz due to the fact that the software's limits mean it cannot handle more than about 4 layers total before it starts to glitch and crash. Furthermore, one of Photoshop's animation features is pre-made movements, such as "pan", "zoom", and "rotate". These create completely smooth movements based on keyframes, similar to in Blender, and so will significantly reduce my workflow while still keeping the animation engaging and full. I think that using a mixture of these smooth movements and hand-drawn animated parts is going to be the best way forward and give the animation a distinct style that makes it recognisable to an audience.

To the left, you can see an example of how I did this; this animation is the first clip in the entire music video of Klause drawing at their table. I have done as stated and used a mixture of smooth animation and hand-drawn animation; the head rotates smoothly, though subtly, to add a bit more action to the animation, while the hand, which is the focus of the shot, is animated by me. This works very well, as the rest of the animation is completely stagnant and only took me a few hours at most to animate. This is how the majority of the music video will look, with only fast-paced scenes being animated in OpenToonz.

As for my fast animation, I will, of course, be using OpenToonz. There are a good few reasons I chose this, the majority of which are listed in my software research; however, my main ones are the capabilities of OpenToonz when it comes to onion skins, framerate, and general interface. This puts it ahead; however, the drawback is that I had to simplify the character designs a lot during this process. For example, during the intro interlude, I basically turned both parents into nearly identical shadowy silhouettes and completely got rid of the painted background to allow more freedom when it comes to panning and general movement. I also became very good at combining layers while drawing (in other words, drawing two layers on one to reduce layer count), and the Uko you see in the intro interlude is actually comprised of only two actual layers.

As you can see at the bottom right, I have three distinct steps when animating in OpenToonz. First is, of course, the sketch layer, in which I use a light blue-grey pencil tool to block out the shapes and movements, keeping fairly close to my storyboards and not paying too much attention to detail and smoothing just yet. I then added some cleaned-up drawings to the sketch, creating my keyframes. Then, I fill in the space between the keyframes, smoothing out the animation and playing around with the pacing until I'm happy. This means that my smoothly animated sections use "straight ahead" animation for the sketch and keyframes and then "frame to frame" for the smoothed-out part; these are techniques you can see me research in my animation subpage.