Oh the irony that in the 2000’s I started a band in Montreal called “The Angry Parrots” only to wind up working on the “Angry Birds”. Fortunately we released an EP and disbanded just as the Angry Birds game gained cultural traction or else I’d have a lot of explaining to do about the band name.
As soon as the pandemic dropped I figured I’d take a few months off to re-assess where I was creatively. Three days later I got a call from Janice Walker asking if I wanted a job, I couldn’t say no because this job was using Toon Boom Harmony in the children’s animation sector which I’d wanted to break into and also it was a team lead/tech research job. I was developing a 2.5 D lighting system from scratch that needed to be production ready and sustainable.
With the tears and sweat of incredibly patient and talented artists, we managed to reach that goal and surpass it. The animated feature Klaus had just come out with its incredible lighting, so the bar was set rather high. I like to refer to what we came up with as “dollar store Klaus”. There was nothing shoddy about the process as delivered however. The first three episodes were incredibly difficult to produce. After a few significant technical breakthroughs in the process we were able to glide through the remaining episodes with comparitive ease. The hardest part was getting the limbs to join the bodies correctly and also when two of the two more characters would wrestle with each other and props.
Reproject
I applied the knowledge I had from reprojection to getting the lighting applied while respecting the drawings stack order. No virtual lights were used. Think of it as a digital analogy of airbrush masking. We use the outlines of each character as a mask which is offset and soft variations in colour added to give the illusion of depth. The overall aesthetic was designed by art director Jeffrey Timmins. My personal contribution to the aesthetic look was to add a slightly darker edge around the highlights to give bit of gloss and make the characters pop just like you would if you were airbrushing an illustration of them. It was a sad day when the series ended, and the team dispersed back into the artistic gene pool. I hope to work with all of them again someday
The hardest part was getting the limbs to join the bodies correctly and also when two of the two more characters would wrestle with each other
Geoff Marshall
