Tony Ascroft Productions
Here's my latest endevour. A series of shorts I'm developing. You can watch them at Tony Ascroft Productions. Hemingway and John in Roundabouts Ontario is the first. Done in Blender - Grease Pencil / Studio One / After Effects. You can also click below to watch the film or visit Tony Ascroft Productions to see more.
The Making a 2 Minute Short...
In the summer of 2023, I was between contracts so, I decided to create my own animation project and to do it all myself.
The idea for "Roundabouts Ontario" came from my sister. She said something along the lines of "you have enough pet peeves, make a cartoon about one of those". So I did.
Having worked at animation studios as both an artist and production manager I approached "Roundabouts" just like any studio project. Concept, script, thumbnails, storyboards and
animatic. I've played in bands and dabbled in music for years, so I opted to do all my own dialogue, music and sound effects. That also took care of the copyrights and licensing fees.
I wrote a song and a script, created a rough storyboard. Recorded the song with the help of a great guitarist and friend of mine Bob Feenstra. While I was doing this, I watched a never ending list
of YouTube videos on how to use Grease Pencil. Here's a shoutout to three YouTube channels I referred to the most.
In no particular order......
Mumo Mundo
Sophie Jantak and
Marco Cobucci
Thank you all for your excellent videos.
I created a page on Google sheets to use as my production guide. Every shot, frame count, asset required, and stage of production, was listed. Scenes were laid out for minimum set requirements
and animation was flagged for reuse.
Assets and animation were created in Blender 3.6. Backgrounds are a combination of meshes painted in Texture Paint mode and Grease Pencil objects drawn on top of mesh objects or as stand alone objects. Characters are Grease Pencil objects animated
with Armatures and Time Offset modifiers for animation. To speed up production the backgrounds are layered stills with the characters animated and rendered separately.
Compositing of the final renders, sounds (including music dialogue and sound effects), and a few minor visual effects, was done in After Effects.
I hope you enjoy "Roundabouts Ontario".
