3D Pepsi Bottle

As briefly mentioned earlier, I had a bit of a flirt with CGI animation back in the early nineties.

In the summer of 1990 I animated and directed a couple of hand-drawn commercials for the small Copenhagen studio Nielsen & Nielsen, which were colored and composited on the studio's newly acquired supercomputer, the "Personal Iris" from Silicon Graphics. Then, from December 1990, after finishing animation at A.Film on Don Bluth's A Troll in Central Park, I actually worked for a couple of months at Nielsen & Nielsen as a CGI modeler and animator.

Well, animation is probably stretching it a bit, since I didn't really animate anything living, it was more like building and rotating various solid objects which were rendered with nice glossy surfaces using 3D software from Thomson Digital Image (TDI). In the end I decided against pursuing a career as an operator of this new technological wonder, fascinating as it was. But I still stayed in touch with the studio and animated some 2D commercials for them, and also served as an animation supervisor for my replacement at the computer.

One such project was this TV commercial for the then brandnew 1.5 liter softdrink bottles (we had never had bottles larger than 1 liter before in Denmark). The Pepsi bottle jumps into the picture and calls on all its new bigger friends: Pepsi Light, 7-UP, 7-UP Light and the Danish energy drink Faxe Kondi.

In this case I did a full hand-drawn animation reference for the action. The new tech guy, Michael Holm (with whom I later worked on a number of exciting and somewhat crazy projects - see future posts) then built the 3D bottles and matched them to the 2D ref. It's pretty simple, and the result isn't perfect, but it was probably the first CGI "character animation" made on Danish soil, so it does have some historical significance :)

The flic above is grabbed from an old VHS tape. Below is the original storyboard from the advertising agency. (As you can see it's a fax - oh, what wonderful eighties' technology!)

Hugo Character Design

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 book on 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.

Jungledyret Hugo

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.

Cel setup from Jungledyret Hugo, 1993

Guldkorn

This TV commercial for OTA Guldkorn (a Danish cereal product) is one of two 30 sec films produced by A. Film and Jørgen Klubien (Klubien Animation) in 1991. I did about half of the rough animation, some of which was re-used between the two films.

The video of film #2 above is grabbed from a 24 years old VHS tape, de-interlaced and cleaned-up to the best of my ability. I only animated the middle part of the film, that is shots 3, 4, 5 and 6. The rest was animated by former Valhalla animator Henning Nielsen. I don't seem to have a final soundtrack for it, so I left it with just the music.

Here is a modelsheet of the teddy bear and a background layout for one of the shots, both drawn by Jørgen Klubien.

Choco Bolo

I went through some old boxes in the attic and found a bunch of VHS video tapes with various animation stuff dating back to the late 1980's. Amazingly, most of the tapes were still more or less watchable, and with a cheap video grabbing device and some patience I managed to clean some of them up to an acceptable quality.

One of the films was a TV commercial for some chocolate crackers called Choco Bolo, which I animated back in 1991 for A. Film and the Danish Disney animator Jørgen Klubien, who was apparently taking a break from Disney at the time. In this case I also found the original animation roughs as well as a copy of Jørgen's storyboard for the film:

Choco Bolo storyboard by Jørgen Klubien 1991.

The film consists of one single shot lasting 15 seconds (plus some live-action). It may be slightly insane of me to share with you the entire 118 rough animation drawings - but what the heck, here we go: