Background Style

Background for a “Crawford’s Corner” Short Click to see bigger

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The above pan background was created for a “Crawford’s Corner” short and was rendered in Flash. It’s a replication of a hand-painted background that was used in an earlier “Crawford’s Corner” short. The earlier “Crawford’s Corner” shorts were shot on 35mm film, and anything new created for “Crawford the Cat” is created digitally in the computer. That, of course, makes a big difference for the way background art is handled.

We are currently working on “Crawford Classics,” a new long-form project featuring the same characters. Within the context of this show, the characters are found in new settings and are not “anchored” to their original location. That’s a good thing for us on the technical end of things. The above styled background makes for very large computer files. Each little “cat head” of the wall paper and each little speckle and dot on the floor requires lots of memory, and when working on these scenes, the computer has to work harder to play back the scene in real time. The background like the one below (and the ones from last week’s post) were designed and created in Flash and used only Flash friendly techniques. It’s much easier on the computer processors and takes up far less memory. The difference is pretty amazing and makes for much happier animators who don’t have to wait patiently for the computer to “catch up” to review their work.

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A background from "Crawford's Classics" Click to see bigger.

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To see a short scene on the background at the top of the this post, Click here.