Concept Art

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! This week in Indiana, the weather has been all over the place. The temperature has fluctuated from the 30’s last Sunday to middle 70’s on Wednesday back to the 40’s on Friday. I guess that’s why they say, “If you don’t like the weather here – hang around for 15 minutes!” Fortunately, no big snow storms or the like are in the forecast to keep us from getting to work. Hopefully, we’re done with all that for this season.

This week at the studio, most of our work concentrated on the preparation of additional concept and publicity art for the Crawford the Cat project. Lots of hours are spent on the designs and settings for supporting characters and the backgrounds for any show, and of course, this one is no exception. The above pieces feature some of the buildings that will be inserted into exterior backgrounds for the city scenes. And below, a nighttime background from Harriet’s home, and also the background from the scene I posted last week.



The backgrounds and buildings are designed by G. Brian Reynolds. Nice work G. Brian!

To see the art bigger, Click here.

Screen Format

Wide Screen - 16x9

Standard TV - 3x4

Several scenes were completed this week on our Crawford the Cat project. The project is an hour long, made-for-television special, aimed at younger audiences. This scene features Harriet the Hare and Crawford the Cat.
While working on a scene, the animator uses the red-line template as well as the black 3x4 TV safe overlay matte to make sure that all the pertinent animation is seen on the screen - no matter what format the show is released in.
The 3x4 format, however, may soon become a thing of the past as more and more producers prepare for HDTV. It won’t be long before all television in the US will be delivered in high-definition by way of digital signals. According to USA Today, Congress is poised to make Feb. 17, 2009, the hard-and-fast date for the national conversion to digital TV. As the 3x4 screen size starts to disappear from television sets and other entertainment platforms, so will the programs prepared exclusively in that format.

To see the above scene in the 16 x 9 format, Click Here.

Pencil Tests

I was digging through the archives this week and found the above rough pencil test from HANDYCAT the seven-minute short we made for Frederator Studios and Nickelodeon. Animators sometimes like to test rough drawings to see how the movement is going. At the studio, we use a software program called FlipBook to test animation. Sometimes the drawings are then cleaned up by the animator his/herself or an assistant and then imported into Flash for manipulation. With this particular test, however, the drawings were not cleaned up, and the pencil test was simply imported into Flash to be used as a guide. Handycat head shapes, body shapes, leg shapes, and other shapes were then aligned with the pencil test guide to make the color version of the scene.

FlipBook and Flash Animation are terrific tools, but it takes a skilled animator to get the best out of them. G. Brian Reynolds is one such animator.

Click the link below to see Brian’s pencil test and the color version of the scene. Actor Rob Paulsen provides Handycat’s funny coughs.

Handycat Pencil Test and Finished scene

(Be patient - the Pencil Test takes longer to load.)

Storyboarding

Click to see bigger.

This week work continued on the Crawford the Cat project. Above is a storyboard page from the show. The storyboard is generated from the script. On this particular show, however, the scripting is not entirely finished. Because of upcoming sales meetings, we are producing a sequence of the show in concurrence with the completion of the writing and storyboarding chores. This is not entirely unusual for us. On “The Ugly Duckling’s Christmas Wish,” a movie we made a few years back, our distributor on that film, Sunbow Entertainment, was able to do advance sales based on a few minutes of the show. That film did pretty well for itself, particularly in Germany. On its initial German broadcast, it won the TV ratings for its timeslot. They sent us a copy of the show with the German dub. Again, it was fun to hear how they had recast the show with the foreign actors. I’m always amazed at how close they can come to finding actors that sound like the English speaking actors.
Speaking of actors, we also recorded some more track for the show this week, so that direction and animation can continue for the promotional piece. I’ll try to post a clip from that recording session as soon as it’s edited.

Slightly Snowbound

Harriet from the Crawford The Cat Special.

Well, development and preliminary production work did continue this week, despite the fact that Indianapolis was hit with a sizable snowfall on Monday night – about 14 inches - and it’s snowing again as I write this. I personally was unable to make it in to the studio for two days, and did what work I could from my home. My business partner Brian Reynolds, on the other hand, was able to do quite a bit of initial animation production work from his home on Tuesday. However by Wednesday afternoon, he had to brave the elements and get back to the studio. The city does a pretty good job plowing the streets; it just takes a little time, especially when it’s coming down as fast as they can clear it away. Regarding the production of this special, as soon as we get a little further into it, we’ll post some animation clips on our website for you to view.

My wife took the above picture of our youngest daughter, Olivia, playing in the backyard during the first day we were snowbound at home.

Ahh winter!

CRAWFORD THE CAT

Currently our studio is in development on a new website CrawfordTheCat.com featuring our character CRAWFORD THE CAT. We're very proud of the site as it develops and hope that it will be well received by parents and the educational market. Being a parent of young children, the project is very close to my heart. The anchor to the website is "CRAWFORD’S CORNER" - a “how-to” series of 13 x 5 minute shorts designed for preschoolers, kindergarten and older. The shorts, completed in 2003, have not been seen in the US television market until now -and only at CrawfordTheCat.com.

Stop by the website and take a look. We hope you like it!

We’ll post more on CrawfordTheCat.com later, and more about the Crawford television special we're developing.

FAT TUEZDAY - LIVE

We put the first :30 second FAT TUEZDAY on our website as well as on YouTube this week. It’s a new venture for us in that it is the first property we will be introducing exclusively on the internet. FAT TUEZDAY features Tuezday – a modern day hippo who interprets life in her own way. Weight loss and the pressures of society on women to keep rail-thin (and Tuezday’s take on it) will be the subject matter for the first ones. Hopefully, they’ll each be amusing and none too serious. They’re each slated to be less than a minute in length. My business partner Brian Reynolds likens these short episodes to comic strips – only with moving pictures. Eventually the shorts will be made available for downloading to ipod and etc.

Check out FAT TUEZDAY here or on YouTube.