Yo Gabba Gabba - Process, Production

KITES ARE FUN

PRODUCTION

(sorry this post has taken so long but I had to do jury duty for a week and also my computer died on me...well, enough with the excuses...)


Layout
After the animatic timing was locked down, I started on the layouts. This stage for me is still one that I draw on paper since it's the easiest and fastest way to do solid drawings. The layout stage is where I take the rough storyboard sketches and refine the composition as well as add poses to flesh out the basic movement. Essentially this is key animation, I have found that this is absolutely essential for doing "flash" animation to keep it from looking cheap.





After these poses are done in each scene I draw up the backgrounds. When doing layouts it is important to be certain that the characters and the background work together to complete the composition of the scene. Here you will notice that the action of the boy as he rises up into the sky is framed by the clouds and the action is mirrored by the line of the trees.

The next step once the layouts are completed, the key poses are inked in. Here's a brief step-by-step on inking process.

BG Painting
Since there were quite a number of BG's to paint for this video, I kept them relatively simple. I used large areas of flat colour, saving the textured and more rendered areas for clouds and trees. This gave the bg's a bit of depth without being overly complicated and also gave a bit of contrast between flat and textured areas. Also, a lot of the detail was simply linework over a flat area of colour or a simple gradient...like the grass for example. The lines help to give the appearance of texture or brushwork with out too much fussing around. As far as colour goes, I kept those simple as well. Since a lot of the action takes place in the sky, I went for a very deep blue. The rest of the colours I kept muted to help contrast with the relative brightness of the sky blue. The bg's themselves were done entirely in Photoshop to save time. I would have liked to have done them traditionally but time didn't allow for that.

Animation
The animation as noted earlier was all done in Flash. Using my layouts and my timing from my animatic, I draw all the extra poses needed directly in Flash. I rarely use symbols to get my movement. One main trick that I do is to be sure to animated entirely on 2's, which means every other frame at 24fps. This keeps the animation from looking floaty and gives it a little more of a handmade feel. This part is the hardest to describe since I didn't save any step-by-step examples as I worked...but basically I don't do anything new or innovative-I just make 'em move.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful to some of you...I wish I could go more in depth, but maybe I'll save that for another post.

Yo Gabba Gabba - Process, Pre-production

KITES ARE FUN

PRE-PRODUCTION

Essentially, the film I did for "Yo Gabba Gabba" is a very short music video. The approach to it is very similar. I was given the song and asked to come up with a written and visual treatment. I listened to the song a few times and images started to come into my head. Since this is a show for little kids, and the song is called "Kites are Fun", it seemed obvious that the video should center around a little kid having fun playing with a kite.



The first step was to doodle out some character ideas, just roughly at first to get some ideas. During the process of thumbnailing, the story started to materialize. Since the film is only a minute and a half, I had to make sure that the story was simple without too many things happening. A boy and his dog play with a kite. A strong gust of wind blows the kite so hard that the boy is carried around the world.

Next, I wrote up the outline and drew some concept sketches. These were then sent to the directors for approval. The network felt that the boy should be younger and cuter so I redesigned him and came up with this.
A bit more like Ralph Phillips.


Once this new design was signed off on, I began to storyboard the film. This was a relatively easy process since the story was already pretty solid, it was basically just a matter of getting it down on paper. Here's a sample:
Since this video was to be completed within a month, I had to make sure that I wasn't going to be making everything too complicated for myself. However, I didn't want it to look to cheap either; I staged the shots fairly simply and had a fairly long sequence without animation so that I could save time for a few more elaborate scenes. During the boarding stage, I made sure that I listened to the song lots of times to plan the beats of the story would correspond with the music. Once the storyboard was complete, I sent that off for approval. Luckily, it came back with no revisions! And so, the next step could begin in earnest; cutting together an animatic.

Maybe I'm weird but this is one of the funnest parts of the process. You often here it mentioned that films are made in the cutting room, well that is totally true. It's a great thrill to see your pictures sync up with the soundtrack. A lot of time, once the firsts cut of the film is done, you can see whether it is working; which parts are flowing nicely and which parts are lagging or dragging. I was really lucky in the case of this film because I ended up not having to either cut anything out or add any scenes...it timed out (almost) perfectly. The only adjustment I had to make from my storyboard was the order of 2 scenes.

Coming up next:

Production.

Yo Gabba Gabba

Since this has already aired I'm going to post the "Jingalong" that I made for Yo Gabba Gabba earlier this year.

Click here and enjoy!

I was thinking of posting an article on how I went about making this film....let me know if you are interested in seeing something like that...

Press coverage

With the festival starting tomorrow, the mighty press juggernaut known as the Sun Media has deemed it worthy to take time out from endless sports coverage, celebrity gossip, and neo-con propaganda to shine a spotlight on yours truly. Actually, it's a pretty good article.

Click here for the digital (online) version.

Anyway, in case you didn't already know, "The Waif of Persephone" is going to be playing tomorrow night at 9pm at the Bytowne Cinema. I will be in attendance, I'll be the one barfing in the aisles.

Have fun!!

Ancient History

Here's something that may or may not be interesting to you select few folks who frequent this plogsite...

Angora Napkin

This is a proposed tv series that my pal Troy Little and I schemed up about ten years ago when we were young and foolish. There is a long and sordid tale behind this particular cartoon which is quite long and filled with humorous intrigue. But despite all of this, the concept is still a valid one. Troy (bless his heart) has kept the fire lit under this maligned idea and has posted the outline on his website here.