Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525032
by comic book artist Alex Toth: "Oh God, stop giving us those big closeups … I'm tired of you guys cutting to his face." Toth had explained to Timm how when he created a concept for a comic book version of The Shadow in the 1970s, he always kept The Shadow at a distance from the audience. "So that became kind of an unwritten rule," says Timm. "Actually, it wasn't an unwritten rule, it was a rule. We told our board artists: don't give us closeups of Batman." "I think the instinct is always to get closer because we want to relate to our heroes and our central characters," says Storyboard Artist Carl Peterson. "I did have to fight that instinct to go in for a dramatic closeup of his face when he's driving the car or something... But I really respect that they had a very specific vision for keeping him at arm's length." The rule was also a way to show Batman's internal development: "He's an emotional mystery," Peterson says, explaining a medium closeup shot that he boarded near the end of the first season: "It was carefully chosen as a moment of growth for the character." A LIGHT TOUCH While Timm says Caped Crusader is not in continuity with The Animated Series, "it has a lot of the same DNA, a lot of the similar motifs and visual aesthetics." He and Tucker reviewed original design material from BTAS to see if there was anything they could reuse and realized they still liked the overall look of Gotham City. But those hand-painted backgrounds were made 30 years ago on black paper. How could they replicate this look digitally? "We had to have Mauricio try to reverse engineer [it]," says Timm, speaking of Mauricio Abril, who was the first Background Painter hired on Caped Crusader. Handed high-resolution scans of the original backgrounds and the animatic for the first episode, Abril was then told to explore. He did one version of a storyboard sequence strictly in the 1990s BTAS style, "but working digitally," he says. "So really looking at how black are the shadows. That was a big component." Heavy black shadows were a hallmark of the noir and German Expressionist influences on BTAS. For his next version he considered how Timm and Tucker emphasized that Caped Crusader would be fully immersed in the Into the Light While Caped Crusader works hard to establish its hand- drawn look, CGI was used for the vehicles. This presented the VFX team with the challenge of making sure they blended with the 2D look as much as possible. With cars driving through the city in front of a panned background, VanTuyle says it's important to consider how the car is relating to that background: "That's where you can start to really feel the disconnect." One way to do this is through lighting. "We would hand- add lighting, making sure we were tracking the lighting effects onto the cars from the background elements," says VanTuyle. Headlights were also important. Effects artists would track the beams from the headlights onto the background, "so that way the car's really interacting with the background," she says. Again, noise and texture were added to the light effects to help the vehicles blend in. While this sounds straightforward, VanTuyle says it wasn't always easy. In one particular car chase in Episode 3, there's a shootout with cars racing through a tunnel. "That episode was definitely one of the ones that we had to work on to really sell it," she says. They had a difficult time getting the 2D background and 3D cars to feel like they were in the same space, so they split the background into layers and used a multiplane camera to add depth. "The opposite of how we would do it with CG," she says. Bringing a 3D effect to the backgrounds, this solution made them feel in the same world as the cars while still maintaining the series' overall traditional look. FALL 2024 23