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Production Design

abimation
Mar 7, 2019
3 min read

One of the things I had to learn to do for this film that I had mostly avoided doing in the past is environments and props or generally production design. I had made some for 10x10 but not a lot and they're something I've considered to be be a weakness for me. I really had no idea how I was going to do this so I took to Youtube and found some tutorials about environment design for animation and I followed along.

I found this one incredibly helpful. It laid out steps for me to got through and I managed to make something pretty decent as a first try following the steps. I thumbnailed out a good few options (6 in total) before choosing one and slowly introducing more colour until finally making something detailed.

While I was really happy with my efforts here and it was ultimately a very helpful exercise this was far too realistic for me. I'm not making a realistic film and this level of detail was just unnecessary so I had to develop this further. It's worth noting that I did this in tandem with the new storyboards because I didn't really think I could do one without the other and it was definitely a good way to work, personally. I felt as though I had made a lot of work very quickly and it wasnt all shite. woop....

But getting back on track, it was too realistic and I needed to return it to something similar to the style I wanted my film to be. To start off with I just replicated the same image with flatter shapes to mimic the way I made the backgrounds for dissonance.

Getting closer this time around. I felt as though I was still copying and adapting the style of artists I like who work with backgrounds ( Susan, Izzy and Steven's work on Steven Universe) so I knew it wasnt quite there yet. I took some time to do some more exercises about composition. This time just looking through the tumblr mentioned on my inspiration page to pick out similar scenes to one of my sequences.

I also knew that i was looking to make this influenced by older cartoons and growing up I loved the looney toons so less intentionally than with full intent I added a little bit of Maurice Noble influence.

Now while I was making these I was considering and designing the way I would move forward. Some of these scenes need to transition between 4:3 to 16:9 and I accounted for both aspect rations with many of these compositions. In addition to that I created a box with which the animation would be best places inside so that things are not too close to the edge of the screen to account for slight differences in screens and projections. This is something I've seen a lot of professionals do and in particular this one:

Ole currently works at SPA studios and his instagram is very inspiring. I've learned a lot from finding him. He's helped me shape my pipeline to something that I hope will save on the effort in the back end, during edit because that is time I'm going to need.

In the end I am very happy with these backgrounds. They feel a lot more like I made them. I just kind of jumped into it knowing all I know about the backgrounds from TV and film that I enjoy. I'll leave some examples here for you:

Then to wrap up I took to illustrating some props, a whole other thing I've never done before. Maybe even less so than the environments. So this was actually a lot of fun. It didn't take me all that long either and I just cracked these all out in an evening. After this I felt like I had put myself in a good enough place to just get going. I had considered basically everything. In doing the backgrounds I had even considered what the astronaut character was going to look like.