Skip to main content

Featured Animator: Nigel Ng - Story Telling Through Music and Animation

Partial Image from 'Character'
by Nigel Ng.
Nigel Ng's animation, Character, is different to the animation I usually feature in this blog in that it is a more conceptual style of animation and story telling.

Designed to elicit an emotional response, it uses music to set the tone, and juxtaposes short animations to create a narrative.

Animators tend to move towards this kind of sophisticated, conceptual storytelling later in their careers, so I was surprised to learn that Nigel has only been animating around 4 months.



Watch the animation, Character, below, and then read on for more information about Nigel and the inspiration behind this work.



Nigel is based in Ontario, Canada, and is currently studying biomedical sciences at university. He animates on the side and hopes to eventually be animating and making videos for a living. Although he's only been animating for about 4 months, Nigel says he's always loved art and drawing since he was a child, and thought he would enjoy animating too.

To create this animation Nigel used Adobe Animate CC combined with a Wacom CTH-460 Bamboo drawing tablet.

In choosing an animation to feature Nigel chose 'Character' because...

...it’s a very creative concept that I haven’t really seen done before consistently. I enjoy the idea of telling stories through video and the idea of being able to capture someones emotions just through watching a video online.  
I think it is more powerful than it sounds because videos have the ability to inspire people into doing greater things, or to bring a smile to someone who may not be having a good day. The way I like to portray my videos is simply through animation and music because those are two art forms I am very inspired by and I think putting them together make a great combination.

I asked Nigel what was the inspiration behind the animation?

In general, I make multiple animations accompanied with music in a story-telling way, and I was inspired when I watched one of the Cineplex short films at the movie theatre. 
At the theatre, they always play a short, CGI animated, film accompanied with music. It always gets people emotional before the real movie starts. The fact that people could  interpret what was going on in the short film without any dialogue I thought was really cool. Also the addition of music helped to convey the right emotions forward. 
There's one Cineplex film I always get emotional watching called Lily and the Snowman. It’s around 2 minutes but you really get sucked into the video when watching it.

What were the main challenges you faced in creating the animation?

Whenever I make animations, I always try to push myself to try something new, so I can keep learning. The biggest challenge in creating this animation was animating the dragon, because it was a lot of detail, and I didn’t know how to start. 
I began animating the motion of the dragon just with lines so that I could learn how the dragon moves, then after, I would start drawing a rough sketch of what I wanted the dragon to look like. Just for the dragon segment, it took me 3 hours to animate every frame, but overall I think I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

Is there anything about the animation you are particularly proud of in how it turned out and why?

I am actually proud of how the whole video turned out because I was able to animate exactly the ideas I had in my mind, and that is the beauty of animation. 
I was pleased with how the animation fit very nicely with the track, and how I was able to change from calming situations to dynamic movements. 
I was also proud of the spinning globe animation because I really wanted to animate the spinning earth the way I envisioned it in my mind. I didn’t know how to go about it in the beginning. However, after tweak after tweak, I think it turned out great!


If you've enjoyed Nigel's work be sure to check out his links below for more information and animations:

Youtube | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Soundcloud


---o ---o--- o---

Would you like to have your animation featured in my blog? Contact me at etourist@arttimeproductions.com with a link to one animation that you would like to showcase and I'll get back to you for additional information about your work. Featured animators are chosen at my discretion and no guarantees are made that your work will be featured. Animations should be suitable for a general viewing audience.

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 for Free Using Their 137 Official YouTube Video Tutorials Sorted Into a Logical Learning Order?

Or you could just buy The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator . While Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is one of the easiest 2D animation studios to get up and running with quickly, learning it from all of the official, free, video tutorials can be more overwhelming than helpful. With more than 137 videos totaling more than 28 and a half hours of tutorials, spread across three generations of the software (Cartoon Animator 3 through 5) it's hard to know if what you're learning is a current or legacy feature that you either need to know or can be skipped. Many of the official tutorials only teach specific features of the software and don't relate at all to previous or later tutorials. As a result there are many features either not mentioned or are hard to find. To make your learning easier, on this page, I've collected together all of the essential, official, free video tutorials and sorted them into a learning order that makes sense. Simply start at

TimeBolt: Fast Video Editing for Anyone Creating Online Courses, Podcasts, or Vlogs.

I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996. It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it. But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm ). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs . Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures , and Toon Hair , designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker. The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that w

KIT Scenarist - Free, Open Source, Screenwriting Software that Helps Research Your Ideas Too

KIT Scenarist Script Writing Software's Mascot, Alexander Cat. While you can write a script in any word processing app, if you're writing stories (screenplays) that feature characters and dialogue, a dedicated script writing app can save a lot of time formatting, letting you focus more on the actual story. Script writing apps are also very useful if you plan to send your screenplays out to production companies, or if you're collaborating with actors and other production people, who are used to scripts being in a particular standard format.  [Note: In case you're wondering there are reasons scripts follow a standard format and are always written in Courier (typewriter) font, including but not limited to; being easy to read by actors, plenty of space for notes, and the general rule that one page of a script (in this format) equals approximately one minute of screen time.] KIT Scenarist , in my opinion, is one of the best script writing apps out there for ease of use, simp

Review: Headshot Plugin for Reallusion's Character Creator 3

Headshot for CC3. Quite possibly the best 3D Avatar I've made of myself in any 3D application. Creating a realistic 3D human avatar is a whole lot easier with Reallusion's new Headshot Plugin for Character Creator 3. The plugin is an AI powered extension that can generate 3D digital humans from one photo. Which sounds like an amazing proposition but, in practice, if you're trying to achieve a specific likeness to an actual person, Headshot will give you an excellent base to work from. Headshot has two modes, Auto and Pro. Auto Mode Auto is well worth a try if you have an ideal photo of a front facing person that is properly lit and posed to Headshot's optimum requirements. It's also the only mode that will take a crack at generating a hair model. I grabbed an image of Harrison Ford, dragged it into Headshot without changing any of the default settings (other than specifying 'male' and selecting an 'old male' setting) and this is what I

AE Juice - Animation Presets, Motion Graphics, Templates, Transitions for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Other Video Applications

Level up you video edits and animations with AE Juice's motion graphics and templates. Some days you just don't have the time to create flashy motion graphics for your latest video or animation. For some of us it's more a question of our own artistic abilities being a little less than the awesome we'd like them to be. Whatever reason a resource like AE Juice's animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for After Effects , Premiere Pro , and other video applications can really make your work stand out very quickly. AE Juice gives you access to an instant library of free, premade content elements and sound effects, which you can add to with additional purchases of various themed packs from their store. There are three ways to manage their content, all of which can be used in commercial projects . The AE Juice Standalone Package Manager makes it easy to browse previews of all your pack contents and to download and find just the elements yo

Murf.ai - Text to Speech, AI enabled, Real People, Online Voice Generator and Video Studio Editor

Most of us are not talented enough to perform verbal gymnastics with our voices, easily imitating people of different ages, genders, races etc. Which is real problem for solo animators with little to no budget. How do you voice multiple characters in your animations? Developments in human sounding, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Text to Speech (TTS) voices is making them an increasingly viable and affordable alternative to hiring real actors (or convincing family or friends to help out). Murf.AI is an extremely impressive online, AI voice generation service that sounds like real people. Not just a TTS service, their online studio offers a range of tools that include editing and adding AI voices to entire video projects, converting your own recorded audio to an AI voice, and uploading scripts to be converted into AI voices, and more. A selection of the 120+ available voices. Within Murf's studio you get up to 120+ AI voices in 20+ languages, as well as a library of royalty free musi