Rocket Saves the Day
Art Director
This PBS special was based on Tad Hill’s bestselling book “How Rocket Learned to Read”, I was brought on early as Art Director to adapt the book illustrations into a 45 minute 2D animated short feature.
This is the initial concept I did to show how I wanted to translate the world from the book illustrations to screen.
Using the assets the team has created during the first 4-6 weeks of production, I put together a world overview package for the Creative Kickoff meeting with the teams at PBS, Tad Hills, the writer and the exec teams at Atomic. Using this package, the creative director and I shared our vision for the project and communicated our plans for the story in each of it’s 3 acts. This allowed everyone to see the project together as whole, and made visualizing the final product a lot easier.
Given that it’s a smaller budget special with tight time restraints, we needed to be cautious about not creating too many new location keys. I wanted to use lighting to elevate the drama of the story arc further. By strategically layering our files, and using adjustment layers we were able to quickly adjust the lighting in our bgs for the last arc of the story to get the sense of passing time and to establish the urgency of characters needing to get back home.
Background Design by Luke Smith (Day)
Background Design by Luke Smith (Sunset)
Background Design by Luke Smith (Night)
I wanted to keep the world bright and airy like a story book. To keep the overall color and paint treatment consistent across the special, I worked with artists closely by providing paint-overs and draw-overs with detailed notes sometimes done live over zoom.
To establish consistant style across the team of 9 members, I created some style guides and demo psds showing how to use the brushes and how we handle textures on this project.
Below are the color scripts I’ve created for a song sequence and a transformation sequence.
As each shop in the story goes through several transformations into different type of shops, I created a road map document that roughly tracks all of the story moment that happens for the director and story team to visualize the world and the spatial relationships at a glance.
Part of the unique challenge of this special was to keep the character design authentic to the book illustrations. I worked with our builds team to figure out how we can use imported texture to keep the harmony build look hand painted but still animation friendly.
Below are additional bg designs created together with the team.
