Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Warner Brothers Animation Background Style Guide

In cleaning up and sorting through a lot of old junk in the studio I came aacross this quickly aging and fading fax from George Stokes the head of the BG Dept. at WB Animation back during the Batman/Sueprman/Batman Beyond era.

In between seasons when the storyboarding was done I switched over to doing back ground designs for a while on the shows. When I started George sent me this fax breaking down how they did it at the time and the 'essence' of their style which owed a lot to Paul Rivoche's great work on Mr. X in the 80's.

George was a great guy to work with and made the long distance relationship with WB being off site here in Philly smoother. So I thought many animation students, fellow artists and fans would find this an interesting read and peak behind the scenes on how we worked.

Animation***I just got an e-mail tonight from Paul Rivoche saying these were his notes to himself about his approach to doing the backgrounds which George Stokes passed on to me.***

2 comments:

SNeelyArt said...

Hey Mike, Do you happen to have the background refs that Paul was talking about in his notes? It would help in seeing what he was describing...

Philip Jean-Pierre said...

Wow this amazing, I just found you here and so glad I did