Hello everyone!

In today’s post I’m going to talk about the animations of Last Time I Saw You, which have been animated frame by frame following the standards of traditional animation. There are many ways to do 2D animation. In fact, during my previous work, I did some skeletal animation using a software called Spine, which allows you to animate 2D images as if they were 3D to give them a very special look (I’m sure you’ve seen this type of animation in many mobile games). But for Last Time I Saw You, because of the 90’s anime references I was following, I decided to go with a traditional frame by frame approach like the movies I was getting inspiration from.

Animating frame by frame is a long – and sometimes tedious – process, but it gives some very unique and charming results. If animated well, all sorts of emotions can be conveyed with traditional animation. Just look at Ghibli and Disney films to see what I mean!

The workflow is as follows: First, the animation team adapts my character designs so that they can be more easily animated (basically redrawing shapes and simplifying some elements without losing the soul of the character). Then, following my guidelines, they make what is called a “rough”, basically the “sketch” of the animation. Here is an example.

Once approved, they make the intercalations and then clean it, reaching what is commonly referred as the Tie Down phase. Here the shadow areas are also marked so they can be better understood when coloring it later.

Finally, they complete it by adding color, shadows and finishing touches. In many movies and in some games, like Cuphead, all of this is made by pencil on paper and then digitally scanned. However, in Last Time I Saw You we made it from the start using an animation software called Toon Boom. As you can see it’s quite a slow and complicated process, but the final results are really lovely!

And that’s how we animated the game! I hope you liked this little introduction to 2D animation. What are your favorite animated movies or animes? Leave them in the comments!

In the next post I will talk about the music of Last Time I Saw You, who composed it and what references we used.

Until next time! 💙
.Juan