Troubles Models

Anezka Sebek called the other day to let me know I had some binders in her office.

I thought they were just photocopies of readings, but it turns out one was a model book we sent to the Poland animation facility for the second season of Troubles the Cat for Sesame Workshop (then The Children's Television Workshop).

The book contains turnarounds for all the characters and painted color models for all the characters and props.

This was painted on cel and the Chromacolour numbers are indicated. We used Chromacolour because it's cheaper in Europe.

For those who haven't had the "pleasure" of working on cel.  This (above) is what the back looks like.

Inking is done on the front, color on the back.  Dark colors are painted first so they don't show through lighter tones.

This (above) is three 8 1/2 x 11 pages combined.

Note the lack of "anatomy" in the right most drawing.  After the dailies for first episode of season one, CTW pointed out a little black dot just below the tail.  We had animated the cat a little too realistically.

This was corrected with the first use of After Effects in any production we worked on.  Mike Turoff framed through the transferred video and removed the bit of biology.

In designing characters, pose drawings are more important than turnarounds.  Sure, animators will ultimately want to see the character from every angle but it's more important to see how the character moves.

These are idiosyncratic designs.  The poses demonstrate how the line contributes to the character -it's expressive and loose.

The cat was then used as a unit of scaling to all the other characters.

You can do that with a grid, in this instance we didn't want to be so rigid.

These characters were designed by Santiago Cohen. The color styling was Elli Albrecht.