The Pilot: Part Three

 I'm the Art Director for the animated series, Archer, currently airing Thursdays on FX at 10 PM.  The below is a brief glimpse into our process in making the show. 
Introduction
The Pilot Part One
The Pilot Part Two

THE BACKGROUND DILEMMA

The backgrounds of our show are something I am immensely proud of.  There is at least one (if not several) every episode that has me do a double take it’s so eye-catchingly good.  Eric Sims and his team (Claire, Rees, Katie and Lamont) crank out homerun after homerun with such consistancy that I rarely  ever give them notes. 

During the pilot, however, things were not going quite so easily for us.  To explain:

At the start of the pilot, these early weeks of January that I’ve been writing about, we  tapped a friend of the company and industry vet to tackle our backgrounds.  Lots of meetings, going over style and furniture and patterns, etc.  Exciting times. 

Weeks go by.  Early February, we get to see what is to be the first of many background paintings… and it’s off.  And it’s not just off by a little, needing a few tweaks; it’s off from the ground up.  From a design standpoint, from a technique standpoint, it is not doable.  Cue giant freak out.

I’m five weeks into production and I don’t have a plan on how we’re going to do these backgrounds.  While I’m silently freaking out in my head, Matt Thompson sets up a meeting with another studio in town, mostly just to get Adam Reed and I out of the house.  The meeting is a blur, so much so that all I remember is that their conference room was pretty kick ass and they all smiled a lot.  They were pitching reference photos from Google Image that I’d found six weeks ago; I was mulling Plan C. 

On Frisky Dingo, backgrounds were done by taking a photo and treating it in Photoshop.  It worked really well for us, but for backgrounds aboard say a floating aircraft carrier, photographs obviously weren’t available.  For those environments, I finally got to use my college degree.  Huzzah!  I have a B.F.A. in computer animation (3D,) and still have some marginal talents in that area.  For Frisky Dingo, I modeled the below environment, kicked out a render and one of the other guys would treat them as we treated the photographs.  Eric Sims had always stood out as being more adept at painting these renders than the other guys, case in point being the below painting, which is considerably better than the render. 

With that in mind, I showed Adam what I could do and more importantly what Eric could do and then, promptly told the girl I was dating I wouldn't be around for the weekend.  My goal was to model Malory’s office as quickly as possible, so that Eric could get painting as quickly as possible, so that maybe somehow, we might just not be utterly screwed.

Through a million cups of coffee and emails with Adam, trading notes and ideas back and forth, I get a decent working model of Malory’s office.  Not final, but close.  By professional 3-D standards, this is pretty mediocre.  Not terrible, but certainly not award winning.  Love that stock photo of the dog though (a placeholder for the final painting.)

 I left the office at 2 AM on a Sunday night.  When I came to work the next day, Eric had taken my subpar render and --within two hours!!!-- painted the below.

High fives all around.  It set the ball rolling in its final trajectory.  No more freakouts, just a fat mountain of work ahead.  


NEXT:  I work until my face falls off building 3-D environments, only to find our answer was in Kansas City (actually Lee’s Summit, Missouri) all along. 

AFTER THAT:  Chad, Sam and David get some love. 

AFTER THAT:  No idea.  Possibly backing up for storyboards.