The fifth week was an extremely productive one. First, I completed all of the lineart in a couple days: the clean roughs and keyframes helped speed up the process a lot, and I’m glad I took the time to do them when as early as I did. The character’s simple design also helped: his head being a sphere meant I could simply copy and paste it into different positions, changing only the inner eye (iris and pupil) between poses.

With that done, I went on to colouring, and I have to give credit to ToonBoom Harmony’s paint options: the ability to paint multiple frames at a time sped up the process tremendously, and combining that with my character’s low amount of colours (and the fact I chose to not shade anything), I completed all my animation’s colouring in a single morning.

With the bulk of the animation done, I started working on the smaller aspects of the animation: I improved the background by adding light blushes and stars, making it feel less empty and more vibrant. I then coloured the flag and projector (using the similar colours to the protagonist, to connect them physically), and made the hologram slightly transparent. It still didn’t quite look the way I wanted it to, but it was a decent placeholder.

I then made the opening scene with the eye planet, which proved to be fairly simple. I made another background, this time including some references to Blink Industries’ other projects, like the Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared protagonists and their “Ideas Horse” mascot among the stars.

I then made the planet itself, using multiple layers to have the inner eye move individually from the lids (layered in front) and the sclera (layered on the back). The protagonist on its top does a simple four-frame loop, which works perfectly fine given how small he is in the shot.

Finally, I animated the eye reaching the top of the Blink Industries logo, using keyframe tweening to speed up the process. Some quick animating of the eye blinking later, and it was all done.

By the end of the week, I had reached a bare-bones version of my animation: no compositing and sound yet, but all the absolutely necessary content was there, and that helped calm my nerves a lot. With three days to spare, I knew I was doing perfectly fine.