Howdy!
My name is Justin Longoz. I’m an animator, illustrator and designer here at Global Mechanic. I thought for my first “big deal” post I’d talk a little bit about the design that I did for the Darfur PSA (which i’ve embedded at the end of this post). It was quite the process, I’ll say that much. We were asked to design an animation that looked like the drawings that were coming from the children in Darfur. Man oh man. Some of those drawings were downright freaky. There were things being depicted in the children’s art that kids just shouldn’t have to see. All that I can say is that this job was a bit of an eye opener for me. I had many sleepless nights.
I got to work right away trying to replicate the line and color content of the illustrations. I spent a couple of days on the net just looking at kid’s crayon sketches and picking the ones that i thought translated the idea of the spot the best. Below you’ll find an original drawing and the replication that I made. Click on an image to enlarge it.
I went through various mediums for the line work. At first it was all felt drawings, but the felt was a little too strong. It wasn’t getting the same effect as some of the crayon and pencil illustrations. So I switched and stuck with pencil and crayon or pencil crayon for the rest of the design. I then created a color template that I used for the rest of the spot. I deviated here and there when trying to design villagers or vehicles just for experimentation sake, but all in all i think i stayed true to the original color scheme.
Once i had determined what my colors would be and what my line work was going to look like, it was time to head back to the illustrations made by the children to see what elements i could take and combine to create a child-like environment. I went through hundreds of drawings trying to design vegetation, animals, huts, villagers, soldiers, vehicles and weapons. I started drawing the different elements and narrowed my drawings down to a few pages of each. Here are just a few page examples of some of the elements. Again, click on an image to enlarge it.
As you can probably tell there was a lot of whittling down. I would design a set of villagers and vehicles (or whatever it was we needed) and then I’d take those illustrations to the director (Bruce Alcock) and the producer (Tina Oulette) and they’d help me pick out the ones that best suited the mood and environment we were trying to create. Over time we finalized the designs of everything we needed for the spot and picked a line-up for our main character and his family. Here are some of the final designs.
From there, we took the drawings that i made and scanned them. I took my drawings downstairs to the light table in the studio and hand colored all of the images with crayon. We then scanned those and combined the images in photoshop. Also, during this process, I separated all of the body parts of the different characters, animals and vehicles. This way, when i gave the animators my finished photoshop drawings, they would have moving parts for them to use. In some cases the animators would redraw from the original design that i created. Other times there would be puppeting involved.
The animators went to work on the animation of the spot and i began to work on other parts of the commercial. Next, I laid out a skeletal design for the character POV as he was being carried on his brother’s back away from the village. After that I spent some time designing the hole that the main character hides in. Take a look:
Now that we had all of the elements of the PSA laid out, we needed to design some background textures and figure out how we were going to make the impact of the bullet at the end have some force. Bruce suggested that we use a “teabag cycle” for the background, which we had done before with a couple of our other spots. Settle down ladies, it’s not what you think it is. Tsk-tsk. Dirty minds. The teabag cycle is a pretty straightforward concept that’s actually quite a bit of fun to execute. You take thick pieces of paper (like watercolor paper), a tea bag (maybe more like 5-8 teabags depending on how long your cycle is going to be), a cloth and some water and you find a nice wide open space. You then dip the teabag into the water and make splotches with the wet teabag onto your paper. You can either then use the cloth or the teabag to paint blobs and swoops onto the page. Fill the page with tea stains and then let the page dry. You may have to get something to hold the corners down. As it dries, the tea stains the page. You start to have a better understanding of what a tea stained page will look like when it dries, the more that you do it. Practice makes perfect. If you make 15-20 pages like this and then put them on a cycle (that is, animated them to play back to back over and over) up have yourself a teabag cycle! With this particular spot, however, we used still images of the tea-bagged paper. Pfff-Ha ha! Ahhhh… Sorry. I admit it, I have a filthy mind. Anyways, we did end up using the cycle for the part where the janjaweed storm the village in their vehicles to add to the chaos of the attack. This is what I’m talking about. Here is a finished teabag frame:
Next we decided that in order to add to the intensity of the bullet at the end of the ad, we would use the old food-coloring-in-water-swirl-trick. Basically we spent a few hours filming red food coloring hitting warm soapy water to create the crazy swirl that gives the feeling of both blood loss and loss of consciousness. It was cool but this part seemed to take forever. We must have done 60 takes that didn’t work before we started to figure it out. Every time we’d get it wrong I’d have to run to the sink, empty the bowl and refill it with warm water. It was a bit exhausting, but we got it in the end.
And that is basically it! If you take all of the above elements and combine them together with animation you get this:
I hope that this was clear and interesting. Let us know what you think! If you liked this post then we’ll try and do more commercial/film breakdowns for you to enjoy so that you can see the processes that we all go through to get from an idea to a finished product.
Stay tuned for more fun!
-Justin
