"Harmony is both a major challenge and a new opportunity for Sugarcube as it allows us to integrate over thirty years of traditional paper experience by our directors and artists with new digital techniques. We intend to establish Sugarcube as the first studio in Korea to respectfully combine the fascinating potential of digital production with our deep, historic expertise in traditional animation pipelines." Kyu Rhee, Executive Producer

Sugarcube is an animation studio located in Seoul, South Korea. Since 2014, the studio has provided a complete animation production pipeline service using Toon Boom Harmony, supported by an experienced group of directors and artists with more than 30 years in 2D traditional animation. Since August 2014, Sugarcube has provided animation production for "Star vs. the Forces of Evil", the Annie Award nominated Disney XD series by Daron Nefcy that is now scheduled for its third season. The lead character in the series is Star Butterly, as an intergalactic teenager with magical powers who is sent to earth as a foreign exchange student.

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Sugarcube is using a 100% paperless animation process for production of this series. One of the major requests from the show creator is to maintain flawlessly smooth movement during animation while preserving the unique design of the characters with clear outlines. In the fast-evolving media environment of recent years, keeping line quality high for a clean picture is a critical challenge that Harmony is helping Sugarcube to meet. When the outline width for a character fluctuates, Harmony easily applies and adjusts it during the in-between process while maintaining sharp line clarity. This sharpness can even be found when characters and objects are zoomed out to be placed on the far background, maintaining virtually all the details in even a tiny space.

"By the nature and origin of our studio, Sugarcube, we instantly, confidently, and strongly convinced the show to be produced in Harmony paperless." Richard SC Bhan, Vice President & Executive Director

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Part of the beauty of using Harmony comes from having its database in a central Control Center so that each process can be shared and modified in real-time. By accessing the Control Center, projects can be integrated and managed for the entire phase of production with their status visible at a glance from a single window. It also allows users to create, change, delete, import and export projects with ease. Harmony is valued as not only a great tool not only for animation production, but also for its efficient production management.

"Harmony has introduced so much flexibility to Sugarcube as a production pipeline service provider, especially when there are unexpected matters emerging. It also offers excellent time efficiency." Kurt Yoon, General Manager

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Sugarcube is committed to training artists to further solidify their traditional skills set as well as transfer them to full proficiency in Harmony as they draw directly onto a Cintiq instead of on paper over an old-fashioned turntable. Even though there have been some difficulties in the initial period when artists were becoming acquainted with Harmony, Sugarcube firmly believes that those setbacks were worthwhile, and even necessary steps, for the establishment of a bigger human resource infrastructure in the industry. The studio continues to expand as they continuously provide top-end production services in cut-out, hybrid, or any other methods that the industry demands going forward.