David Burt on setting a 3D stage in Penelope Penrose

David Burt is an animator and compositor based in Beeton, Ontario. A self-described Toon Boom Harmony generalist, he has worked on productions with WildBrain Studios and Brown Bag Films. He was also one of 50 artists selected to participate in Toon Boom Animation's Ambassador Program in 2025. Between studio productions, David likes to experiment in Toon Boom Harmony, unrestricted by notes from clients or supervisors.

Using the software as his laboratory, David creates animated shorts using out-of-the-box techniques to further hone his skills. One of his ongoing projects in development is Penelope Penrose, an animated sci-fi action serial inspired by B-movies of the 1950s.

We sat down with David to discuss Penelope Penrose and his recent experiments with Harmony's 3D stage, including clever uses of rotated 2D assets to 'fake' 3D scenes.

 

Why don’t we start with a quick introduction?

David: My name is David Burt, and I'm an animator who is also very interested in compositing and pushing into all the different features of Toon Boom Harmony, and using them in sometimes unusual ways. I went to Sheridan College for animation, and after that I interned with Wild Brain. And then I worked at Brown Bag Films. I'm going back to Brown Bag Films to work on another project with them.

And then, on the side, I work on my own films. Right now I've got two: Penelope Penrose and another project that I bounce between. When I get tired of working on one, I'll bounce to the other one, and then, when I get tired of that, I'll just bounce back.

I saw the teaser for Penelope Penrose. What inspired you to make an episodic B-film-style space adventure?

David: This started out as a thesis film and I continued working on it after college was done. But all of my pitches for films went back to the types of stories that you'd see in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. I like the feeling and aesthetics from that era of storytelling, and I especially like old sci-fi.

I have a collection on my hard drive of as many old pulp sci-fi covers as I can find. There's something so appealing to me about sci-fi before people really understood what was really going on in space. They let their imaginations fill in the blanks. Getting back to that like unfettered creativity was nice.

Did you just add the narration to the teaser for context, or do you plan on leaning into that Buck Rogers serial style?

David: The current plan is to start as if this was a single episode in an ongoing series, so that narration is a planned part of the first episode. Once I have the completed ending of the episode, the narration is going to come back, and he's going to do the like, “Tune in next time!”

I see a bit of Craig McCracken influence in the art style. What were some other influences on this project?

David: There is an old cartoon called Colonel Bleep that I use for a lot of my reference. It’s very simple and stylistic. The animation was very, very rough. But I loved how abstract the backgrounds were, how shape-based everything was.

It wasn't quite UPA, but it felt like it was the UPA before the UPA was around. And of course, a lot of my lineless artwork for the short was inspired by the UPA shorts as well. They had this weird short where Martians were learning all about how society on Earth ran on gas and all that. The style of that specific short was a big influence, too.

How large is the team on this? Is it a one man production, apart from the voice actors?

David: Yeah, it's a one man show for now. I am interested in getting more animators on it in the future to get it done. But for now it's me.

I put out a casting call on the internet [for the voice of Penelope] and Kelsey Painter is amazingly talented. She reached out to me after I put out the casting call, and I was really, really happy to work with her.

The guard was voiced by Jay Berryman Crawford. I know him from a project that we collaborated on years and years ago. We worked together on an old webcomic. He wasn't doing voice acting on that project, but I knew that that's something he was interested in, and I called him up years later. And he did a fantastic job.

And who did the narration?

David: Oh, that's Jay as well. Yeah.

What prompted you to have two personal projects on the go while working in a studio?

David: I always want to have something on the go besides my professional work, because that's where I have the space to learn a lot of stuff about filmmaking, about Harmony, and about every part of the creative process.

I don't know if “breakthroughs" is the right word, but all my breakthroughs, when it comes to my creative process, have come from personal work. That's the space where I'm not restricted by what somebody has commissioned me to do, or the style of a certain show that I'm working on. I get to experiment with everything.

On a project like Penelope Penrose, I get those shots where I get to learn something new about the software, like whether it's implementing parallax in an unusual way, or a 3D camera move. I find that I'm learning so much as I make the short that I want to go back and incorporate that stuff earlier in the cartoon.

One of the things that I'm looking into right now is adding 3D models into Toon Boom. I know that they recently added a feature where you can take blender models and put them right in. I haven’t experimented with that yet.

But when I was first working on this film, what I had to work with was basically image planes. But you can get a lot out of just constructing a 3D scene out of image planes rotated in 3D space, if you're creative and know how to use that.

If you draw the ground or the landscape, and then tilt it, so that as the camera pans by, you're not just getting the parallax of the things that are parallel to the camera, you're also seeing the ground shift in perspective as the camera flies by. Things like that.

How’s your experience been so far with incorporating 3D elements into Harmony?

David: I think the most obvious example of that in the film is Penelope’s ship. It's my first dive into the 3D process in Toon Boom. And right now I think [the ship] needs a redesign. All the wings on the ship are stacked up image planes.

And while that worked, when I was first figuring everything out, I think I could go back and redesign the ship in Blender, import it properly, and actually have the textures on a 3D model rather than having a very rudimentary set of image planes.

I think the 3D tools are definitely an underutilized part of the software. I have this scene where you start in on the characters on top of that building. and the camera zooms back and back and back and back until you can see the entire planet.

That kind of extreme scale is very difficult to do. But if you back the camera out in 3D, then things work much, much better. So that's something that a person who isn't familiar with the 3D tools might not know.

That seems especially useful in a genre that deals with a cosmic kind of scale. Are there other experiments you want to try out in Harmony?

David: There are a couple of concepts that I scrapped for this first episode that I think would fit a lot better in a future project, whether that's Penelope Penrose, or another film entirely.

I find that I have a lot of fun exploring those high concept sci-fi ideas. You get a lot of unique, interesting concepts to play with that you can build character drama around. So for this specific short, I have a character who is a thief. She's very greedy, and she's being sucked into a black hole.

So you have this concept, this black hole is sucking everything in. It's a visual representation of greed, and character dealing with that same thing herself. And she sees how destructive the black hole is. She sees how she's being self-destructive. So, using these insane sci-fi ideas.

How have these experimental projects affected your studio work? Have you been able to bring things to the table that people perhaps hadn't considered?

David: Yeah. For example, on one of the professional projects I worked on, there wasn't a 3D team, and we had a shot in a carnival where one of those rides was rotating in the scene.

The problem is that we had a background department and props department that worked entirely in 2D. So we got a 2D image of the ride that was supposed to be rotating in 3D space. So the team was a bit stuck.

I had started to work on this film, building 3D scenes and objects out of image planes, and I thought, “I can do this.” So I was able to contact my supervisor, explain what I could arrange for the scene.

The background department and I built up the 2D layers that we needed to construct the prop in 3D. And it came together. That knowledge from my own experience benefiting me in the professional world has happened a couple of times. There are little holes in the production that are overlooked during the storyboard process.  And I know how I can like to fill in that space. So that's come in handy.

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• Ready to see more from the mind behind Penelope Penrose? Be sure to visit David Burt's portfolio.
• Ready to begin your intrepid adventure into 2D animation? Artists can download a 21-day trial of Toon Boom Harmony Premium.