More Shade

When I started making story time shorts a few years ago I really wanted to lean into the manga/anime aesthetic. After all it has had a huge effect on my artistic principles. So as I was creating this format, I focused on a lot of “manga-isms” in aesthetics. From speedlines to black and white and so on, I made it a point to make a motion comic in the style of a manga as close as I possibly could. One of the big stylistic choices I leaned on was the use of screen tones for shading. The use of tones has such a unique look and it really adds a lot to black and white images. Unfortunately at the time the only way to easily make screen tones, was through the app Procreate for the iPad.

Since that point I’ve exclusively have used procreate for generating screen tones for my shorts. It’s pretty easy and intuitive to use the effect in the app, but it did lack flexibility for me. In order to streamline exports I would usually have to export a background with its screen tone. You can imagine how frustrating it is to update a shot where a screen tone has to be changed and removed from another app and re-uploaded and so on.

It’s a pain in the butt!

So over time as the production of the story time shorts grew more complex, I began creating and updating a master effect file in after effects. In that file lies dozen of manga effects I’ve made and used over the years (and I update this file yearly now). Last year I decided it was time to try to make a plug-in for screen tones that I could easily use. After some experimentation and time, I was finally able to make an effect that I like which allowed me to make a variety of different screen tone textures with very little effort. That said, due to the less frequent schedule for story time shorts, I haven’t been able to use them in a short yet. There are plans to use them for future story time shorts however.

Lastly, this plug-in will be free to download on this site and whatever other store fronts I choose to make in the future. The plug-in was made in after effects 2024/2025 and I’m not at all sure how it will work with earlier versions of the program. If you work with earlier versions of after effects and download the plug-in, please let me know if it works or not, and I’ll update the store with that information. Along with that, I do plan on upgrading this plug-in over time, so if you download it, keep it in mind.