Problem Four: Forty Seconds In Two Weeks (Part 3)

Storyboard to Production Art

With the storyboard approved, I was anxious and able to get to work on the actual production artwork.  First I created detailed "tight" pencil drawings of all the elements--backgrounds, props, Santa--everything except one view of the client's product, a beer fermenter that was to be the showpiece of the last scene.  This would be created from a photograph provided by the company.

Here are a few of the drawings:

The bar with long shot of the fireplace.  This was the most complex drawing of the whole project.

The mantle in closeup.

These were all scanned and imported to Animate Pro, each on its own layer, ready for tracing and color.

Finally, there was the fermenter, a shiny stainless steel tank on a stand, with valves and pipes.  Though I had good color photos of this, I felt that the lighting depicted was not right for the setting, so in Photoshop I stripped out all the color, made it into a high-contrast black-and white-image, and then deleted all but the most essential linear elements.  This is what I then imported into Animate Pro:

The fermenter in linear form.

From now I would be doing everything entirely in Animate Pro.  After inking everthing in black with a thin but variable brush, I then filled all the forms with temporary colors, using a palette limited to just six values of blue-gray.  This was partly to establish my value range and partly to prove that all the inking gaps were closed.



Next: Color and Movement, and the Finished Movie