While working on the scene 28 of Adult Toy Story, I realized that it would be a nice touch to have some steam floating around. After all, Honey’s deeply involved in her shower so of course there’d be steam!
Since this is an effect, I wanted the easiest way to do it. After looking into the Toon Boom Animate Pro templates, I didn’t find exactly for what I was looking.
A quick Internet search turned up a Flash tutorial. I assumed that since Flash and Animate Pro are similar that I could apply the approach. But it still didn’t give me the results I imagined.
The next best thing I found was a Photoshop tutorial. This was quick and worked as I imagined. Here’s what I did:
1. Before starting, I thought about the look I wanted and how best to achieve it. I’ve learned from past mistakes to not rush into any creative activity without knowing what I want.
2. I determined that the fastest and most effective approach would be to create one file. In Animate Pro, it would be on its own layer that would move upwards, animated in the program by simply establishing its start and end keyframes.
3. Once I knew how I was going to create this effect, I created a file in Photoshop whose width matched my film’s and enough height to allow for upward movement.
4. I set my foreground and background colors to the defaults, black and white.
5. I chose the Cloud filter.
6. I made the file into a layer and deleted the white.
7. I changed the opacity.
8. Done!
This file was then imported into Animate Pro and put on a layer at the top so it floats over everything else in the scene. I then clicked on the starting frame in the Timeline; placed the art at a starting point and keyframed it; clicked on the ending frame in the Timeline; dragged the art to its ending position and keyframed that.
I played the movement and made adjustments for timing until I liked it. Here’s the scene with just the various effects: