CRAFTING A SCENE
FOLLOW ALONG WITH THESE STORYBOARD PANELS FROM PETER RABBIT, DRAWN BY SIMON ASHTON FOR A SCENE IN WHICH PETER AND MR. MCGREGOR FIGHT
guess that made their solution a literal ‘A-ha’ moment.”
Art director and concept artist Fiona Darwin also highlights the LEGO films as an example of where the art and story teams needed to solve specific design problems, while doing so within the confines of the LEGO brand ‘style guide’ that restricted brick types, colours and even the way pieces connected. Some of that could be worked out via the use of the publicly available LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) tool, while other aspects required more practical solutions.
“I loved the challenge of getting in there and playing around with the bricks,” recalls Darwin. “I might be building the interior of an airplane and deciding whether or not the seats are three studs or four studs wide for each of the characters, and what was going to be interactive about them and how that was going to affect different departments down the line.”
For the first Peter Rabbit film, the script called for a fight between Peter and Mr. Mcgregor. “The script basically stated: ‘Peter and Mcgregor have a fight’, and that was it,” says Simon Ashton, who was a senior storyboard artist on the movie. “I had to come up with a scene that was not only comedic, but with violence that felt real and not one-sided. It couldn’t be Peter getting the upper-hand all the time, he had to take a beating also. At this stage we were still trying to define the comedic tone of the film so I referenced movies like Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling footage. I loosely boarded it up and pitched it to the director, and he loved it!”
In terms of visual effects, Toby Grime contributed to key designs for some holograms in Captain Marvel, noting that the team was given wide scope on how they should look and move at the art direction stage. “We came up with the idea that these holograms would expand and compress like an accordion. It’s handy to relate things back to very analog, physical things, which gets the idea rolling
quickly. You’ve seen holograms and UI many times in films, so do you just go down a well-worn path or do you create a whole new look? If you make it too obscure, people don’t get what’s going on, which comes back to the golden rule: support the storytelling in that moment at all times.”
As noted above, what’s interesting is that the art and story teams don’t tend to just be involved at the beginning of production. They can have an influence at all stages, as Animal Logic director David Scott, who has worked in story, art direction and VFX at the studio, attests.
“Even modelling and blend shapes can be a heavy art direction task. You get the first pass of a model, but then it comes back to the art department for paintovers in Photoshop as a guide for corrective shapes. Art direction also extends into post-production at the lighting stage. After a review a shot might come back to the art department for a quick paint-over to illustrate where a keylight is, or to rebalance or grade an iris highlight for a character.”
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
One thing is clear after spending some time with the art and story team at Animal Logic: they are extremely well versed in imagining a multitude of worlds, characters and scenarios, often fitting into what David Scott describes as ‘artdirected realism’, the closest thing he says to Animal Logic’s house style. Each project seems to outdo the previous one, and also pushes forward the studio’s technology (something that will be discussed in future parts of this series).
Indeed, Felicity Coonan sums up her role as an art director at Animal Logic as sometimes being about ‘breaking the machinery’. “We’ve got a really super-duper refined pipeline, but if we’re sitting comfortably in that lane then we’re not doing our job. We’re actually looking at a couple of projects now that are totally going to make the technical and R&D teams sweat. But we’re keen to be challenged. That’s what I love about doing this work.”
Discover more at animallogic.com
“WE’RE KEEN TO BE CHALLENGED. THAT’S WHAT I LOVE ABOUT DOING THIS WORK” Felicity Coonan, art director, Animal Logic