Procreate Dreams
The legendary Aaron Blaise reveals how he made his latest animated short in the newly released Procreate Dreams app
Early last year I was contacted by Procreate and asked if I’d be interested in talking to them about a secret project. Intrigued, I said yes.
They informed me that for several years they’d been working on a new animation app called Procreate Dreams, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in trying it and creating a demo animation. Once again I gave them a resounding yes!
They gave me full reign to develop a concept. Because of my Disney background, I settled on something story based and that I could likely animate in a few weeks. The fact that they’re based in Tasmania was on my mind so I started doing research on the area and learned the region is home to one of the smallest penguin species in the world, known as fairy penguins or little blue penguins. I also discovered that the island of Tasmania has simply breathtaking cliffs. Coupled with the software name, this sparked a concept of this little penguin that dreams of flying.
A few days later, they got me an early build to start working with and I was off. Being an alpha build there were a number of features not yet in place, but I still found it super easy to use. I spent about 12 weeks doing the project, including full animation, backgrounds, colour, and sound and music, with a little assistance on the character colouring. In my Disney days, a shot of approximately the same time on a film like Beauty and the Beast would take a team of 65 many months to complete.
I approached the project the same way I would any other. I’m a frameby-frame character animator, so I used Dreams the same way I might have used a stack of paper and pencil many years ago: one drawing at a time, one frame at a time. I also used some of the built-in keyframing tools for things like the panning of clouds, as well as the opening shot where we vertically pan up the tall cliff.
That’s the beauty of this software to me. It has so many features that it can apply to numerous workflows. Want to make a classic cartoon? You can! Want to draw over live-action video and use it as a replacement for After Effects. Check! Want to create anime-style sliding backgrounds with broad acting on top? Go for i
