This Student Crew Used Toon Boom Harmony To Create The 2D/3D Hybrid Short ‘The Legend Of Bill’

In Jacob Birmingham’s directorial debut The Legend of Bill, a duck takes on a fox in a high-stakes desert race. The catch? Bill the Duck doesn’t have a truck suitable for racing through the desert. All he has is his Ford Bronco.

Taking inspiration from animation legends like Genndy Tartakovsky and Chuck Jones, as well as live-action directors like James Mangold, The Legend of Bill balances wacky humor and the life-or-death stakes of off-road racing.

The short film, which integrates 2d characters with 3d vehicles, is currently being developed by Birmingham into an animated series. It was produced entirely by Lipscomb University’s Creative Entertainment Arts students, and it won best sound design and original score at Lipscomb’s 5-Minute Film Festival.

Read on to learn what director Jacob Birmingham and producer Michael Stephens had to say about wrangling multiple software tools and animation techniques along with student schedules in order to finish The Legend of Bill.

The action and the comedy really shine in The Legend of Bill, but the trucks steal the show. How important was it to get the Bronco and the F-150 right?

Jacob Birmingham: Pretty important. We worked on those for the duration of the summer. So coming in, a lot of things weren’t ready, but the designs of what the trucks were supposed to look like were pretty locked down.

That would have been the work of our production designer, Kristen “Kay” Breshears. She was fantastic. She pushed it super cartoony. I had a very realistic way of drawing the trucks, which I knew was not pushed enough. She pushed it into super-cartoony.

Where we landed is pushing the design and the action and everything else to a Looney Tunes level and then reserving it just a little bit, so it has that cartoon pushed aesthetic feel but it still feels grounded. Because we have a lot of comedy in the film, but we also have a lot of drama in the film. So we needed those stakes to feel real.

These cars were selected as extensions of the characters. Initially I had built in a truck that was a little bit more souped-up and a little bit more powerful. And then it was like, “Well, he needs to be an ‘underduck.’ He needs to be in something that looks like it can’t beat the other thing.”

My mom and dad had a Bronco when I was growing up, which is a much bigger vehicle. I remember my dad saying something about it being on a truck body. So I knew I wanted this to be a truck race, and I was like, “I wonder if there was ever a Bronco truck?”

I found out that the very first release of the Bronco had three models. One of them was a roadster, one of them was the classic one that we know, which has the boxy back on it, and then they had one that was a half-cab, where the back is chopped off and it looks like a little truck. And it actually looks like a duck!

The Legend of Bill uses 2d and 3d animation. What was your experience like using Harmony on a hybrid production?

Michael Stephens: Harmony is all the 2d side of it. For the 3d side of it, some people preferred Blender, some people preferred Maya. I believe everything was rigged in Maya though, and we did our rendering in Maya. Maya is like the off ramp for the 3d side, Toon Boom Harmony is the off ramp for the 2d side. And then it was Jacob here doing a lot of compositing to put it all together.

Birmingham: Both of those programs give you a tremendous amount of control of what you can output. So we were probably a little greedy in our output. We had a lot of data that needed to be wrangled together to composite what both Maya and Toon Boom Harmony were able to produce for us.

Stephens: Yeah, and on the 2d side and the pre-production, obviously we used Storyboard Pro for our boards. And then for animation, we were in Harmony. And our school has premium accounts loaded up on all the machines and I have Advanced on my own computer. So we basically just did it traditionally.

It wasn’t like one person going in and keying everything. Each animator got their own shot, and that was true of our cg shots as well. Just about every shot was touched by at least two animators because there would have been the truck and the 2d character inside the truck.

Birmingham: A few people did that through and through for the whole thing, but for the most part it was that. And Granny’s wheelchair is also a 3d vehicle. That shot was three animators because it was me animating Bill, and then our cg lead Mitchel Kline animating the wheelchair, and then our other 3d animator John Willis animating Grandma.

And so that was that stack of things and that’s how we set up the whole film. That was a really cool teamwork project. It was also a very slow shot. We had another person come help us out in the following semester and she did all the paint on that shot.

So there were definitely a lot of hands on all these shots and I’m really proud of the crew for just the teamwork and being able to execute that stuff and be super flexible. I think we did find an economy of scale, but we pretty much did every shot differently to some degree.

• Interested in seeing more? Find The Legend of Bill’s behind-the-scenes footage on Filmfreeway and Instagram.
• Working towards your own thesis film? Students may be eligible for up to 84% off licenses for Harmony and Storyboard Pro.