Before beginning production on ‘Le Morne’ I spent some time using Adobe Animate as my learning platform. Over the course of a few months, I created a few test animations and experimental pieces to help me get my head around the animation process. After a few months of experimenting, I did my research into some more ‘traditional’ animation software and came across TV Paint. This program has a huge range of brushes and allowed me to create animations that feel old school with medium such as watercolour, oil paints and ink illustration. ‘Le Morne’ is an emotional and historic film so I felt the delicate traditional touch of watercolour and hand drawn frames really fitted perfectly with the themes.

The backgrounds have been created in Manga Studio as much like TV Paint, MS is more focused on ‘traditional’ painting brushes. View the gallery to get a feel for some of the backgrounds created for the film that were crucial in creating the atmospheric world of 19th Century Mauritius.

As the film is based around an island, the sea plays a huge part in the world building. After spending nearly 3 months at the beginning of the production process trying to animate the sea in a frame by frame hand drawn manner, I came to the conclusion that this will be incredibly time consuming! I looked into some various 3d softwares and settled on Blender. The 3d sea fits nicely into the 2d hand drawn world without looking too out of place and just helps to add some proper physics to the landscapes.