Project Review: The Phantom 2040 PART 53

Aunt Heloise's living room was a regular set we visited in the show with the rock fireplace above.

A typical exterior city shot done as a quick production background replacement.

A detailed lab interior looking down from the ceiling.

One of the fifty plus shots I revised for the train sequence in the opening movie with The Phantom 2040.

Phantom 2040-PART LIII [53rd]

Production Layouts

Client: Hearst Animation Productions.
Art Director: Myself.
Project Date Spring 1993.

In this 53rd post on "The Phantom 2040" television Animation Series I have put up some of the layouts that I did for production. These are done very quickly as I was fixing the backgrounds that were done by our vendor in Canada that were wrong.

As an Art Director on an Animated Series I was responsible for the look, and even though we were a low budget show, as far as our competition was concerned, I still wanted to get the look right, so I took it upon myself to fix as many backgrounds as I could myself.

We had all layouts done in Canada, and I went up there for a few days to help establish the look, but I still had to correct a good portion of what we got. The biggest area of concern was the simple proportions. We lived in a "Tall and Thin" world as the characters were all 10-12 heads tall and super gaunt, as they were built from Peter Chungs concept sketches. The layouts tended to be even shorter than real life, like a midget world, so I had to redraw full sequences. as they shortened the height in some areas rather than to stretch them up.

Above you will see a few examples of some areas that I had to revise. Also a Production background is a much more simple design over a Establishing Shot Background, as there are hundereds per show so it was not like an establishing shot, where you do just one shot and they match the rest, I did all the shots for the train car as an example, which came to over fifty backgrounds just for the train area. Also each sketch is between 15 and 45 minutes to design and draw so you must work very fast compared to a few hours for the establishing ones.

Cheers, THOM