Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1475662
seen more sophisticated acting, more sophisticated joke telling," notes Wasson. Art Director Andrea Fernández remembers one of her first meetings while working on Cuphead. Hundreds of characters were pinned on a wall, and they started discussing which characters to make episodes out of. She was included in story conversations from the beginning, so she could start envisioning the world and, more importantly, how to accomplish it technically. She credits this collaborative process with helping to pull off the intricacies of the show, wrangling the multitude of influences and ideas into workable, budget-conscious solutions. "The hardest part was to take everyone's hopes and dreams, and then put guardrails around it and really make decisions about how we could actually make a show that looks like this in the timeline given and with the resources we had," says Fernández. They had to examine every creative decision and be deliberate in their choices. The backgrounds were incredibly intricate, intentional, and detailed. "There was just a lot of strategy," says Wasson. "If we're going to have one really big adventure episode where [we had] lots of new locations, then we would try to have an episode right before that mostly took place in the cottage…[and] easier for the background team." This trade-off manifested in smaller, more character-driven stories followed by episodes with larger scale adventures. "This isn't like modern shows where you can just move every layer around and it's relatively flat, and I'm going to get you a new background in about two to three hours," says Fernández. "Each background took up to 16 hours to paint." ADAPTI NG TO TH E PA ST Aside from sometimes viewing backgrounds as a quasi-live-action set, the storyboard artists had to adapt their techniques to account for the time period, eschewing anime shortcuts and dynamic angles that didn't exist in the 1930s. Instead, storyboard artists like Megan Boyd focused on the gags, strong staging, and hitting cinematic moments where they count. "It was a fun challenge of picking moments to really highlight the animation," she says. The storyboard team and directors started with denser outlines with some dialogue written, a few pre-visualization drawings for each episode, and references such as textiles or architecture from the period. Each team would then add their own jokes and ideas, encouraged to get creative and sometimes pitching wild storylines. "I think all the boarders went crazy at first," jokes Boyd. The other key consideration for the storyboard artists? Music! "So much of that 1930's jazz has such great beats and rhythms that I can listen to it with my eyes closed and just see characters moving to it," says Wasson. They wanted to emulate this synergistic relationship between movement and sound, and enlisted the help of Ego Plum to compose the music for the series. For the more music-driven episode sequences, Wasson and Segurson collaborated on original songs, with everyone on the team immersing themselves in music from the era. For the finale episode of Season 1, "In Charm's Way," Boyd choreographed a tap- dancing number for Ms. Chalice as she takes the boys on a joyride through town and dances on cars. "I spent a long time watching old-timey tap-dancing videos, trying to get the era in my mindset, so it felt authentic," she says. "It's just a really fun challenge making something visually flow with music." For these self-proclaimed animation nerds, an opportunity to share their appreciation for the 1930's rubber-hose style was a dream come true. "It was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity project," says Fernández. Adds Segurson: "It completely embraces the magic of animation in a way that I haven't been able to work on in another series before. And maybe we're going to bring it back, where no matter how old you are, you can find humor and you can find the wonder of the animation itself, all in one package." F E AT U R E 38 KEYFRAME