Pirates

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.

Disco Worms - Storyboards II

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.

Disco Worms Character Design

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).