Painting in Harmony is actually a new hobby for me now. I wanted to test the boundaries and see if I could paint something with depth and tie everything together in Harmony. Everything you saw in The Gate was done in Toon Boom there was no outside software. I knew I put my all into it, but you never really know if it’s going to work or have the punch you want it to. Shane Plante: Horror can be very unforgiving, and I didn’t know if it hit home until it was done. The Gate is a 2d-animated horror short, by Shane Plante, about finding things that should have remained forgotten.Ĭartoon Brew: How do you feel looking back at The Gate now that it’s out in the world?

We caught up with Plante to discover how he used Toon Boom Harmony to bring his vision to life - or death, as the case may be. With The Gate, he was able to combine his professional experience animating shorts with his personal love for horror, creating something that is rarely seen in mainstream animation: terror. An animator at the Ottawa-based studio for the last 14 years, he is a self-described “jack of all trades but master of none” who has worked largely on Mickey Mouse shorts, alongside other projects. Working as part of the Mercury Shorts program, Plante created the entirety of The Gate using Toon Boom Harmony (including the backgrounds!). He brought his sensibility for scares to his latest short, The Gate. Mercury Filmworks’ senior animator Shane Plante has a taste for these ingredients of fright, having a lifelong appreciation for the genre. Great horror storytelling shares key elements - fear, revulsion, surprise, and terror - which allow a scene to become truly haunting.

Toon boom program