Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1493292
D E PA R T M E N T 41 KEYFRAME SPRING 2023 41 Winter 2018 For our first issue, we knew we wanted a TAG member on the cover, and Creator Daron Nefcy was a great candidate to illustrate the process behind pitching your own show. Our art team drew the background sketches inspired by elements from Star and the Forces of Evil, and we loved the idea that all of these illustrations were being birthed out of Nefcy's head. We avoided the design trope where you have the top of someone's head opening up and all the characters spilling out. By actually standing on Nefcy's head, Star becomes more than just an idea. She becomes a character in the real world. Spring 2018 This was one of our more playful covers. Cosmo Segurson brought the entire set of his stop-motion short, The Prince and Mr. Whiskers, into the TAG art gallery. We had a rough idea of the concept, but until we were able to set it up and play with the miniature instruments and furniture, we didn't know what we were going to get. One of the great things is that the photo shoot reflected what Segurson was doing on his film: working with live elements and then adding animation to tell a compelling story. The process felt organic, with our team photographing the set and Segurson creating original artwork. Spring 2019 We wanted to show the process of creation in animation, and we came across an early sketch for How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World online. We loved the idea of a single image showing the progression from ink to screen, and when we pitched it to the studio, they loved it, too. Because we needed a perfect matchup to make the two images work together, the studio asked Director Dean DeBlois to sketch Hiccup's face and blend it seamlessly with the finished artwork. DuBlois happily obliged, and a poster of this final cover image traveled around the world with the DreamWorks 25th Anniversary art exhibit. "I'm so grateful for the Keyframe magazine coverage of my Nickelodeon short The Prince and Mr. Whiskers. It definitely got eyes on me as a creator. My combination of stop motion mixed with traditional 2D was the focus of the article, and it really helped me land an executive role on The Cuphead Show! where we implemented the same techniques." – cosmo segurson