Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525032
1940s. He referenced the old Fleischer Superman cartoons, "since they're sort of like a spiritual sibling," he says. "How can I combine that atmospheric aesthetic with BTAS?" This second sequence was done in this style, while Abril describes his third version as having the more cinematic lighting of modern animation, but through the lens of American architect Hugh Ferriss. He loved Ferriss's moody graphite renderings of old New York, which had heavily influenced original Gotham City designs: "I thought, how much can we keep the graphic appeal of the traditional BTAS, but maybe infuse it with a little more lighting." "[Abril's lighting treatments] just kind of blew us away, especially for daylight scenes," says Timm. "That was one thing we never really nailed on BTAS." In moving away from the flatter, blacker look of BTAS, one of the challenges was making sure that nothing felt digital. One solution, Abril determined, was to keep things as simple as possible. If he had an exterior shot of a warehouse, for example, and there are buildings and the sky behind it, and trash cans and other objects in the foreground, "you might think, oh, well, let's make everything into [its own] layer," he says. Instead, to keep the graphic look, he made the foreground objects one layer, the middle buildings one layer, the background buildings one layer, and the sky one layer. "It's four layers max," he says. He then used the spatter brush technique in the Photoshop Lasso tool to create gradation. "I laid it down across the page, maybe one or two passes. I felt like it gave the paintings a little bit of grit, a little bit of tooth," Abril says. "[Plus] you can take whatever shape you have, and you do a little nice spatter airbrush on it, and you basically have a light color and a dark color." The BTAS daytime scenes often had a lot of true black, but "the moment you add true black to a colorful scene, it can change the impression of the rest of the colors," Abril says. This is where the Fleischer cartoons came in, since they are known less for their shadows and more for an atmospheric watercolor look. "The contrast was a lot less apparent than if you were painting [a] shot from real life," Abril adds. Using this technique for Caped Crusader, he reduced the contrast between light and shadow, which in turn gave the series' look more sophistication than its predecessor. "How much can we keep the graphic appeal of the traditional BTAS, but maybe infuse it with a little more lighting." –Mauricio Abril F E AT U R E 24 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E