I recently came across this wonderful picture from Gerhard Hahn Film in 1988. It was posted on Canadian animator Nancy Beiman's Facebook page last month and shows the staff at the West Berlin animation studio as of April that year. Thanks Nancy! I hope you don't mind my stealing the photo, I just had to have it.
From left to right: Michael Hegner, yours truly, Nancy Beiman, Stefan Fjeldmark, Andy Knight, Børge Ring, Gerhard Hahn and Jody Gannon. It even has the NAC Quick Action Recorder, a very early (and fantastic) animation test computer, sitting there on the right! So retro.
The crew at Gerhard Hahn Film, April 1988: Michael Hegner, Dan Harder, Nancy Beiman,
Stefan Fjeldmark, Andy Knight, Børge Ring, Gerhard Hahn and Jody Gannon.
This picture really stirs up a lot of memories. Forgive me for tripping a bit down the ol' lane. If you're not into that, please skip the rest of this post.
Inspirational sketch / location design by Uwe Saegner, 2006.
Here are two more sequences that I boarded for the feature "Jungledyret Hugo 3 - Fræk, flabet og fri" (see the two previous sequences here).
Hugo has left his best friend Rita the fox on Meatball Charlie's island in order to go hunting for winter apples on the mainland. In the inspirational sketch above, drawn by German illustrator and background designer Uwe Saegner, Hugo discovers an apple tree in the distance. Hugo's apple hunt soon turns out to be a foolhardy enterprise, as he gets caught in a snowstorm and is almost run over by a car.
Later, Rita goes looking for Hugo, and finally finds him frozen half to death. Hugo, of course, downplays the seriousness of the situation and tries to charm his way out of it.
There's no denying it. I definitely have a soft spot for Hugo and his friend Rita the fox. These two wonderful characters have been with me since I animated the first sequences for the first Jungledyret Hugo feature back in the summer of 1991. As I did about six minutes of footage before the other animators joined the production, I also had a hand in refining and adapting the character designs to suit the classical style of animation. Especially Rita I have really come to consider my own little baby.
Inspirational sketch by Uwe Saegner, 2006
Luckily I have had the good fortune to work some more with Hugo and Rita over the years. In 1995 I produced and directed a PC game based on the first feature, for which I also did most of the animation. I have drawn modelsheets and developed walks and run cycles for the Hugo TV series, and illustrated two books about Hugo's further adventures. In 2003 I made character designs for the third feature, back when it was supposed to be done in 2D - that is, as hand-drawn animation. And three years later, when "Jungledyret Hugo 3 - Fræk, flabet og fri" (aka. "Amazon Jack" or "Jungo Goes Bananas") had finally been financed - and changed into a CGI project - I ended up storyboarding half of the movie.
Here's a couple of sequences from the animatic for that film. It's a temporary edit of the raw boards. It has been shortened somewhat in the final film. The dialogue is in Danish.
In the beginning of the movie Hugo is spending the winter with Rita in Denmark. He dreams about the jungle where he belongs, but Rita introduces him to the fun of ice skating on the frozen lake. Meanwhile, a mouse is struggling to get hold of the only apple on the island. Alas, to no avail.
A bit later, Rita enjoys the romantic snow setting, while Hugo is bored and wants to go hunting for more apples across the lake. The mouse seeks revenge for the loss of the first apple, but again fails miserably.
The storyboard panels below are from the second sequence.
Nocturna is an incredibly beautiful movie. It has that magic from the old Disney features, the feeling that you are simply there. This universe really exists. It sucks you in.
It's hard to deny that the character designs in Nocturna are pretty weird. Especially the main character, Tim, looks very odd indeed. Honestly, those designs are too artsy for my conservative taste. But the backgrounds, the colors and the mood of the film is just wonderful.
So when I saw the teaser on the internet back in early 2006, I just knew that I had to be part of this film. I contacted the Spanish animator Sergio Pablos, whose studio, Animagic (now SPA Studios), had made a substantial part of the animation on Asterix and the Vikings, which I also worked on a year earlier. Animagic was subcontracting on the animation for Nocturna, and I managed to get a piece of that action.
How such a good looking film was made on a EUR 8 million budget seems a bit of a mystery. Well, one explanation is probably the Spanish wages. I worked pretty hard, churning out some six seconds (nine feet) of animation per week, but still only made about a third of a regular Danish animator's salary, certainly not something you can live on in expensive Scandinavia. But hey, I've got scenes in Nocturna, that's what matters.
This is a linetest of a sequence that I animated with Tim and Tobermory the cat (carrying the star, Adhara, on its back) as they run across the bridges in the sky from which the stars of Nocturna are suspended.
Lineup of the five main characters in Marco Macaco by Dan Harder, 2010.
Given the financial constraints of the Marco Macaco feature production, the character modeling process was deliberately planned for maximum reuse between the characters. Hence, a Build-A-Bear-style system was devised in order to create models consisting mainly of other characters' body parts.
The core model was the main character, Marco, followed by the two villains, Carlo and the President, who both inherited Marco's eyes, ears and hands, but had alternative mouths setups. Carlo got a copy of the President's nose. Thus, for the heads, we had one type of eyes, ears and hands, two kinds of noses and three different mouth setups. The monkeys' mouth areas were by far the most expensive to produce because of the many blendshapes needed for the characters' expressions and ability to talk. All facial features could be reused in variable sizes and with a certain amount of distortion.
Lulu was entirely a variant of Marco, only with different proportions and new clothes. So was the Captain who, however, received a nose from the President. The bodies of Carlo and the President were unique, but pretty much everyone else's were reused in all sorts of manners. Overall we had four types of bodies to make combinations from: normal, strong, big and fat. All existed both in a dressed version and one with a naked torso (for the pirates and a number of local monkies). We had two kinds of legs, one with shoes and one barefoot. There were long trousers and shorts, long sleeves and T-shirts. The sleeves of all jackets were somehow derived from the President's (which were in turn stolen from the Disco Worms villain, Tony Dean). Monkey kids were made by shrinking the mouth and nose region and enlargening the eyes. And so on and so forth. The cast also included some turist pigs, which were all built from the same template, just with different clothes and accessories. Confused?
You won't be after a quick peek at this simple chart, clearly describing the pattern of reuse.
One thing that helps make character designs more interesting, is if the individual characters are distinctly different from each other. Not just in the details, but in their overall graphical shapes.
Most of the regular monkeys in Marco Macaco are relatively similar, but our three villains are indeed represented by three different basic geometrical shapes. The President is an upside-down pyramid or triangle, Carlo is a big fat cone, while the Pirate Captain is more or less a ball.
Nailing the design of Carlo, the primary villain of Marco Macaco, took a little back and forth before the director Jan Rahbek was happy. As you can see from the early sketches (below), a number of different ideas had already been floated prior to my arrival on the project.
Early sketches of Carlo by Jan Rahbek and Teddy Kristiansen, 2009.
The Monkey Island in Marco Macaco is ruled by a ruthless dictator, the President, whose security interests are Marco's most passionate concern. Whereas Lulu's model is basically a modification of Marco's, the President has a completely new type of monkey face, which is in turn reused for a number of other characters, such as pirate monkies and some incidental characters.
Early sketches of the President by Jan Rahbek, 2009.
President suggestions by Teddy Kristiansen and Kim Hagen, 2009.
As with Lulu, preliminary sketches had been done by Jan Rahbek, Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen. As you can see, my final design didn't deviate much from the early ideas. I exaggerated the shoulders to make his body shape more triangular, and after a few attempts settled on the funny long muzzle. I kind of like the graphical quality of the mouth, something that is not often seen in CGI animation.
On the Marco Macaco feature, as on the Disco Worms, and again necessitated by the limited budget, extensive reuse was planned between the characters. The monkeys in the movie were confined to three major types (or races, if you will), the vast majority belonging to the same race as Marco. That was indeed the case for the female main character, Lulu.
Her initial rough design was done by director Jan Rahbek. More suggestions were made by designers Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen. But as usual, Jan knew pretty much what he was looking for, so my final design didn't stray very far from his original vision.
Early sketches of Lulu by Jan Rahbek and Kim Hagen, 2009.
More Lulu sketches by Teddy Kristiansen and Jan Rahbek, 2009.
Inspirational modelsheet for Lulu by Dan Harder, 2010.
I don't think I'm offending anybody if I say that the Marco Macaco feature (aka Carlo's Casino) is probably the weirdest movie I have ever worked on. At the same time it is also one of the best looking.
Marco Macaco movie poster, 2012
Considering the budget (less than 3 million dollars) it is down right amazing what the team of artists achieved on this project.
With an average footage requirement per animator of 16 seconds (24 feet) a week, the animation is really quite good (not least thanks to the animation director Tonni Zinck). The backgrounds, mostly built in 3D, have been further enhanced by beautiful hand painting, giving this CGI feature a fresh style and unique atmosphere, which easily outshines movies with price tags many times higher.
The movie (released 2012) was produced by the Danish studio Nice Ninja, which also created the feature Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms, released 2008 (back then the studio was called Radar Film).
On this production I was once again entrusted with the task of doing the character designs. Just like on the Disco Worms, some preliminary designs had already been done when I arrived on the project. And this time too, the main character, Marco, had already been modeled in 3D, based on some loose sketches done by the film's director, Jan Rahbek.
The feature Jungledyret Hugo (a.k.a. Jungle Jack, Amazon Jack or Jungo) included the first appearance of CGI animation in a Danish full-length animated movie.
As mentioned, the film was conceived and executed as a low-budget project. That meant that all the shots were generally planned in the simplest and cheapest way possible. Even so, when we were well into the production, I felt an urge to push the envelope a bit. To do something just a little bit extraordinary or extravagant. Something that would challenge us and perhaps raise an eyebrow or two. I presented the thought to the director, Stefan Fjeldmark, and volunteered to do the extra work.
As usual Stefan was quick with an idea. He had this sequence towards the end of the movie, in which Hugo and Rita had to swim through a sewage pipe under the city, in order to escape to the harbor so that Hugo could go back to the jungle. The sequence was already planned and storyboarded in the regular way, using something like 10 or 12 shots. Instead, Stefan now suggested that we do the entire swim in one long shot, which would enhance the experience of Hugo and Rita holding their breaths under the water. Since they were swimming around corners etc. it would require me to animate the changing perspective of the background by hand as well as the characters. I liked the idea, and Stefan re-boarded the sequence with the same action, only this time all in one continuous shot.
The design of the Hugo character - the star of the three feature movies that bear his name - has undergone quite a development from the original sketches to the last movie (which was done in CGI). In this post I will share with you some sketches and modelsheets relating only to the first feature movie, which was released in 1993.
It should be noted, of course, that the design for Hugo was originally conceived by Carl Quist Møller, the son of Hugo's inventor Flemming Quist Møller, who co-directed the movie with Stefan Fjeldmark. Carl, who also ended up animating on the first feature, has a very nice description of how Hugo was originally designed for a radio play and an illustrated children's bookon his own website. And during his studies for the book illustrations Carl actually animated a short movie with Hugo in a somewhat crude but charming style. The film was run on Danish television in 1987 as an ad for the radio play.
When the idea arose to turn Hugo into a classically animated feature, Carl also participated in the redesigning of Hugo. But it was Stefan Fjeldmark who adapted Hugo into a more Disney-like character, as shown on these early modelsheets from 1991.
Whenever people ask me which of all the movies I worked on is my favorite, I tend to go for the animated feature "Jungledyret Hugo" (sometimes called Jungle Jack, Amazon Jack or Jungo in English). That is, the first one in a series of three, which was released in 1993.
Jungledyret Hugo movie poster, 1993.
The movie was done with a relatively low budget, and was hardly expected to become an all-time classic of Danish animation. But as the years have passed, it seems to have captivated one generation of children after another. This is probably due to its touching story of a strong but impossible friendship told through a very charming gallery of characters.
And, no less important, the animation in this movie is actually quite good. In retrospect, I suppose Denmark has never had a stronger animation team than at that particular moment. A bunch of us had just returned from a few years at Don Bluth's studio in Dublin, Ireland, loaded with freshly acquired knowledge from the highly skilled former Disney animators there. Others had experience from the first Danish Hollywood-style animated feature Valhalla.
All the lead animators had individual characters assigned to them, enabling us to give very personal and coherent performances. The tight budget required quite high weekly outputs, but that also meant that full sequences were placed in the hands of relatively few people. This, coupled with the fact that most of the animators had to clean up their own animation, assured a high level of control and consistency of each character throughout most of the picture. Its rough and somewhat dated look notwithstanding, the movie still has a lot of life and charm to it.
Let's wrap up this small Disco Worms potpourri with some animation.
I'm not really a CGI animator, even though I did have some encounters with the technology back when it was quite new in the early nineties. In 1990-91 I did some simple modeling and animation on a Silicon Graphics "Personal Iris" computer with software from Thomson Digital Image (TDI). And as Autodesk's 3D Studio became available for DOS-based PC systems a couple of years later, I also played around with that for a while, doing the mandatory jumping architect lamp test. In the end, not much ever came of my 3D animation career.
A decade and a half later, however, having been deeply involved in the designs and facial setups of the Disco Worms characters, I couldn't resist the opportunity to brush up on my 3D animation skills. So I selected a sequence of my own storyboards, which I was particularly fond of, and set out to animate it using Autodesk's Maya software.
Forgive me for sidetracking a bit, but it was while storyboarding on "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" that I was first exposed to the wonders of the Wacom Cintiq.
To the few of you who may not know, it is a drawing tablet built into a computer monitor. I had earlier tried my luck with a regular tablet sitting on the desk beside the computer keyboard, but the necessary hand-eye coordination proved too complicated for me. I reckoned it would take me a month of very poor drawing ability too get to an acceptable level, and I simply didn't have the patience for that.
But with the Cintiq it's completely different. No learning curve, you just jump right in and draw with the electromagnetic pen directly on the screen. Fellow storyboarder Kim Hagen and I considered it for about five minutes, then ordered two Cintiq screens for ourselves, and we never looked back!
Gone were the days of re-tracing the storyboard's backgrounds to the next panel, or alternatively scanning and assembling the boards in the computer (in the old days it would be a lot of xeroxing, scalpel edge-cutting and magic tape). Characters and backgrounds could now be rotated or resized in Photoshop according to your exact desire, providing more accurate layouts for the background artists or CGI previz/blocking. As for the look of the drawings, I quickly acquired the now legendary Martin Madsen Photoshop brush, which is essentially a scan of a real pencil. Most people can't even tell the difference. A piece of truly useful technology.
Turning back to the art of (Cintiq) storyboarding, this sequence features the first rehearsal of Barry's newly formed disco worm band, taking the challenge of limb-less acting to a new level. How do you play the Stratocaster without any arms? Or the drums?
Well, when the disco music plays, nobody worries about such particularities.
My original task on "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" was doing storyboards together with my old friend and colleague (and former roommate) Kim Hagen. In this case we boarded the entire film together, with Kim doing almost two thirds of the footage. (As it happened, in 2007 Kim and I seemed to be the only ones left of the "old guard" of Danish animation who were still actually drawing for a living.)
Kim had been part of the initial development of the movie, and was working on his second sequence when I arrived. His first sequence, where Barry finds his dad's old disco record (Disco Inferno by the Trammps), was already in animation, so for the rest of the production we were pretty much playing a game of catch-up with the animators. What's more, since I soon started squandering all my regular working hours engulfed in the character design process together with the 3D modelers, I had to spend every evening, weekend and holiday at the drawing desk, trying to complete my boards.
Figuring out how these spine- and arm-less creatures got about their daily tasks was an interesting challenge. And where there's a will there's a way - apparently you can't keep a good worm down!
After trippin' a bit down memory lane, let's fast-forward to the (almost) present:
The project "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" (produced by Radar Film in 2007/08) instantly appealed to me. The whole notion of a bunch of worms forming a band and playing disco music is inherently hilarious! I was initially hired just to do some storyboards, but quickly got sucked down the slippery slope of my own spinelessness. I just love disco music, and worms are... well, also quite interesting.
Early sketch of Barry and Tito by Teddy Kristiansen.
When I arrived on the project, preliminary sketches had already been done for most of the characters (by Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen). And the main character, Barry - named after a famous falsetto-singing disco superstar who, according to a reliable source, refused to have one of his songs included in the movie's soundtrack because of a worm being named after him - had by then been modeled in 3D.
However, the 3D model still didn't have any facial expressions. But because of the tight production schedule, the animators were already starting up on the first sequence, which meant that they were forced to animate the basic body action with the pupils' movements as the only element of facial acting.
So I threw myself at the challenge of designing mouth and eye shapes for the existing Barry model. None of us really had too much experience with advanced 3D character setups, so we were sort of just learning on the fly. In retrospect it is clear that we went about it all wrong, building a series of fixed expressions instead of a more flexible kind of system like those used everywhere today. But hey, we got the job done.
These are some of the sketches indicating to the modelers how to build Barry's facial blendshapes (as you can see, I moved from drawing on paper to working on a Wacom Cintiq on this production).
Here's another rough animation scene from Asterix and the Vikings. This is a closeup of Asterix, once again arguing with Obelix. They have set out to sea in pursuit of Justforkix, the nephew of the chief of the village, but there is no wind. Obelix is hungry, complaining that there is no food on board.
In this shot Asterix says: "Well, maybe you shouldn't have eaten all the survival rations on the first day!" When animating dialogue on these characters I took special care to adhere closely to the style of mouth shapes drawn by Asterix' creator, Albert Uderzo. You may notice that it is distinctly different from the standard Disney style.
Pencil test of the entire sequence, all animated by me, at the bottom of this post.
I'm going to start this blog by showing you some animation that I am particularly happy with. From 2003 to 2005 I had the privilege of working on the animated feature Asterix and the Vikings, which was produced at A. Film, Copenhagen, Denmark, and directed by my longtime friends and colleagues Stefan Fjeldmark and Jesper Møller.
On this movie I worked on the storyboards, did character and prop designs, and served as lead animator for the main characters Asterix and Obelix. Animating these guys was a real treat, especially for me, since the comic books played a significant part in shaping my life-long interest for drawing and art.
Here are some rough animation key poses from a scene with the two best friends arguing about whose fault it is that their troublesome holiday child, Justforkix, who was entrusted in their care, fled the Gaul village to the cold North and fell in love with the Viking chief's daughter.
