When the pandemic started, I immediately went to search tv series that I didn’t watch while I grew up. Seinfeld was one of them, I didn’t watch the series because I was relatively young for that series and later on my life I discovered Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm which is one of my top 5 series of all time, so eventually I was going to have a go to Seinfeld and I was not disappointed.
INTRODUCING THE BELOVED CHARACTERS
One of my favorite episodes of the sires is the Parking Garage episode, I was connected to that episode because that situation in which you lose your car on a huge parking lot at a mall it has happened to me. Later on I discovered that Greg Daniels wrote this episode which I found that very interesting because I truly love a lot of things he has worked on (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, The Office).
From a couple of years now my creative process has started as sketching ideas on the iPad using procreate and at first I only wanted to do short sketches of the characters. I’ve always liked the character designs you found on studios like UPA and Zagreb Film, and I think that was my inspiration on that, to design the characters as part of a short film this studio could have made.
THE PROCESS
When I finished the characters I uploaded them to my instagram account but the more I was looking at them the more I was loving them how they looked and I thought what if I could make a more sophisticated composition with them.
It started with the layout (the very basic image you see first) from there I played a little bit with the composition and the height of each character.
I later started playing with the lettering, I started my research on Pinterest looking for parking signs and I found 3 great signs which I adapted into this lettering piece.
When the composition was finished I started playing with a version of George with a lot of colors and I didn’t liked it but I remembered that UPA and Zagreb Film had short films that for some characters instead of using a lot of colors they only used a couple or even one solid color.
Later I started working on a background also similar as the style of these awesome studios and when I finished it I was completely sure it worked and it looked great.
ANIMATION
Because this was a piece that was inspired by great stories told by these great studios, I wanted to do an animation test at least with one character.
It’s not to long ago that I started using Toon Boom Harmony, I think it’s a great animation software, it has so many great tools, the only thing is that for some reason I prefer doing the rough animation using Photoshop with Animdessin or Rough Animator on the iPad, this time I started with Photoshop.
When the rough animation was finished I rendered the video and I imported it into Harmony to do the clean and also the color.
I finished it on After Effects, I know Harmony has a lot of options with the nodes, but for compositing I prefer using After Effects.
FINAL RESULT
