Welcome to Rusty’s Ramblings – a quick peek through the eyes of Emmy Award-Winning Rusty Mills, producer and director on Pinky & The Brain and Animaniacs.

This week from Rusty…

You don’t start out on a trip without knowing where you’re headed. Being prepared is one of the most important aspects in anything you do - including undertaking a new animation project, regardless of whether you’re doing a short 10-second clip or a full feature-length production. Taking the necessary first steps can make all the difference in how well the final piece conveys your message. There are many decisions that have to take place along the way, and leaving them all until the last minute when animation, compositing, or rendering is being executed, can slow down production, and even delay the final delivery. In major film productions, several levels of preparation have taken place prior to the first frame of film being shot. So your project deserves the same tender loving care!

Let’s take a look at some steps that are used in a typical animated project.

Many times a script is written to start the process. On lots of independent projects the script process is skipped or becomes a simple dialog script generated from the storyboard for use in recording.

Storyboards are a crucial part of the process. It’s the first time you’re able to visually put your thoughts down. If there are multiple people working on the project, it’s essential that you have a storyboard to help convey the story.

Two storyboard pages from the Animaniacs short “Two Note Song”

I use storyboards on my personal projects to help work out some of the initial staging and acting points of the film. When doing work for a client, it’s the first way you can get them to understand concepts and even sign-off on various aspects of the final piece.

Visual development is a way to throw out some ideas for the design and color of the finished production. You may have seen various “art of” books , such as The Art of Finding Nemo, published about mainstream feature animated films.

Here’s a background color key used for Tiny Toon Adventures “Night Ghoulery.” Color keys are small versions of the background used to direct other artists on the color and style of backgrounds of similar scenes.

Development art is a favorite choice among publishers of these books. This process can range from simple character sketches to painted illustrations. Some artwork created for development is used later in the production when color and lighting are being determined.

The interesting thing about development art is that you can use the color styling of one piece and the design of another for the final project. That is why sometimes when you see development art from a production, it doesn’t look like the final film. It also may be an idea that was changed or thrown out.

This is a color script which was created for my film,“Gotcha Covered.” Color scripts are used for determining the color styling for a particular sequence of a film.

One of the best preparation steps you should do just before you animate a scene is thumbnailing, which is sketching a small rough draft. No matter what kind of animation you are doing, or how well you draw, doing some thumbnails will help you figure out your scene. With thumbnails you can figure out poses and acting for your scene.

Doing some of these preliminary processes can make a big difference in the quality of your final animation. Plus it can save you time and headaches during the production.

You’ve seen all the pieces, now check out the finished product! Go to Rusty’s page to check out his work from start to finish!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Rusty's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.