JEFE, WOULD YOU SAY I HAVE A PLETHORA OF ROBO’S? :: ::

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

One of the great pleasures, and frustrations, of character design is the process. For this project, we had the privilege of already having half of our work cut out for us. Series artist on Atomic Robo, Scott Wegener, has created a character design that is instantly ready for animation. Still, whenever you attempt to bring a character to life through traditional animation, the team must have a fully realized and comprehensibly understood character model. Even with the beautifully iconic and streamlined Robo illustrated for us through two graphic novels, we had to come to a place where the scale, mass and the angles of every aspect of Robo were understood. This turned out to be a fun process but much longer than we originally thought.

In my own expirience with comic illustration, I never realized how much I have the tendency to go “off model” to enhance and stylize a character in any given panel to emphasize the action that is going on in the page. When reading a comic book, the reader fills in the action between panels allowing the artist to take more risks or leaps of faith with the understanding that the reader will take his cue and mentally “see” what is never actually drawn. With animation the same effects can be achieved but there is a narrower margin for error. With this in mind the team needs a solid charcter model that can always be referenced before altering any shot to achieve a desired effect.

Overall, The process was a blast and we came up with an Atomic Robo that we believe will be true to Scott’s vision.

Included in this post are a few samples of the evolution of Atomic Robo from sketchbook to character model sheet, to the finished color pass. Cheers!

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ATOMIC ANIMATION BLOG:: ::

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Hey Gang, Jeff McComsey here! It looks like I’m the first poster to our brand new Atomic Robo production blog. This time around The Fictory has about six artist working on Atomic Robo. With an undertaking like this we all wear many hats. For instance during pre-production I focus on story boards and then I transition to background design once production starts. Here’s a few of the boards I produced for the animatic. I’ll be posting some process stuff later on showing how we take a storyboard to the finish scene. Stay tuned True believers we got a ton of art we’ll be posting in the coming weeks!

Thanks for looking!

Atomic Robo Storyboards

Posted in Atomic Robo: Last Stop, Fictory Production Blog | 5 Comments »