Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1257506
F E AT U R E 26 KEYFRAME this page: In Primal, the design team avoided sky blues and green grass—every color had meaning. Epps, the line work and the heavy use of black was used to help achieve this look. She recalls doing a black shadow pass to give the backgrounds an inky feeling reminiscent of graphic novels or comic books. As the series traveled to different worlds, Epps recalls drawing visual inspiration from the art of Syd Mead, and films like Blade Runner, 2001 and Indiana Jones. "A lot of the background concepts I would do were very light- heavy in mood and tone, so I enjoyed creating those worlds,' Epps says. Primal's aesthetic includes plenty of nods to the visual styles of graphic novel and comic book artists. Tartakovsky referenced the art of science fiction cartoonist Frank Frazetta and the Conan comics of Robert E. Howard. Tartakovsky and Art Director Scott Wills originally gravitated toward 1970s era sci-fi art before moving in a different direction as the storytelling began to mature. The rules of the series included no blue sky, no green grass. Every color had to have a meaning. "Because there's no dialog, the animation had to do a lot more work," Tartakovsky says. "Having the studio and the young animators real- ly put in their all took the animation to a level that I pretty much have not done this consistently in television." A show like Primal doesn't figure to be an outlier for long. Industry