Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1120864
D E PA R T M E N T 35 KEYFRAME ALAN BODNER ART DIRECTOR Bodner had been working for Warner Bros. Classic Animation under legendary background artist Dick Thomas when storyboard artist Harry Sabin mentioned his name to Brad Bird. "I showed the core team my work. Later I learned that it was my fine art, my abstract paintings, that really caught Brad's eye, something in the color that he really responded to," says Bodner. He was offered the art director job even though he had never worked in feature films and was relatively inexperienced by his estimation. I began going through the storyboards pinpointing key moments to create a color script. Production Designer Mark Whiting really had spent quite a bit of time with visual development pieces, so I wanted to stay true to his initial design vision. That's when it became interesting to me because I hadn't ever done color scripts. I had art directed a little bit for Warner Classics, where I was painting and keying backgrounds. On this film I started to understand that it wasn't just about a single painting; I was really learning to understand how to tell a story through color. I think that's what Brad imparted to me. I watched movies with him and he would point things out to me. It was like I was going to a college course in cinema. I remember taking frames of black and white films and just copying the lighting. A lot of the films were film noir, filled with mood. The challenge with The Iron Giant was to go from a happy place to a very dangerous one with the film's color. As we built toward the final battle, the saturation of color went from bright to muted. The whole idea was it's getting colder and colder as the giant is starting to transform. Everybody's really scared of this giant. In order to make the Iron Giant become the gun, the color was desaturated over time. This gave the scene the most impact when the giant left: Clever ways of framing the Iron Giant next to Hogarth was critical to establishing scale formZ, to build Hogarth's house. Once we got the rooms where we wanted, you could show it to the board artists, and they would get the story down. This set was very interactive and the background was an additional character. If you have one character and the environment, that's two characters in the scene. And then an objective viewer, the third character, is the camera that's watching what's going on. Once we had that triangle established, then we could do the traditional 2D camera work, to adjust the cameras where Brad wanted them. But then if they had the Iron Giant in the scene, you would do computer tracking of the camera. If it didn't work we'd try something else. We had half the schedule, half the time, half the money. For instance, we were told, "You cannot have any snow because you've used up all the money." I remember Brad said, "We need snow, it's a story point." We painted snowy backgrounds in 2D, with a couple of little snowflakes, and then towards the end of the film when the snow has to come down, we used effects. When I started to see the dailies, I was shocked at how beautiful it was. I realized we had an amazing film on our hands, and I was very surprised when it came out and it wasn't supported. I stayed out of the industry for about a year, and I said, "Maybe I'm not going to do this anymore because we did the best we could and it didn't go anywhere." There's a couple of films in your lifetime if you're lucky to work on them, they last beyond your lifetime. It wasn't a job, it was an experience, it was a kind of love affair. Licensed by: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved Color keys courtesy of Alan Bodner SUMMER 2019 35 SEQ 275 CONTEST OF WILLS SEQ 358 MISSLE LAUNCH/YOU DECIDE