Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/589428
18 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 their initial sketches on paper and put those in and start refining in Photoshop. It can be a little bit of both. Here at Sony, there is nobody painting traditionally. If you are doing a sequence illustration, everybody does them in Photoshop. So you are using a pen and tablet? We are using the Wacom Cintiq high-definition [unit], so you put the stylus right on the screen and paint. It is so close to tradi- tional painting in many ways. You are applying right to your board. As designs progress, who ultimately approves them? The director is king. It's the director's movie. I was hired for the ability I have, but it's a team effort. The team is trying to find the vision of the director. He's the first stop. We get an assign- ment – the ballroom –we work on how we are going to decorate it. We show some preliminary sketches to [Director] Genndy Tartakovsky. He's really great. He's the type of director I like working with. If he likes it, he lets you know right away. If it's not right, he'll pull out a sketchpad and do a little thumbnail. His is the approval we are looking for. Are you a Sony Pictures Ani- mation employee, or are you brought in for specific films? I have been a permanent employee for 12 years. I was 2D traditional animation for almost 10 years at Walt Disney Feature Animation before that, and I was doing truly hand-painted stuff – paint and brushes. Describe your workflow. We work on a multitude of things. First, we do design of characters, environments, and props within those environ- ments. That's just design – no color at that point. I have people who are primarily designers – all they do is design things for me. Then those get passed on to the painting team, and they are responsible for the appropriate colors and textures, and really rendering the things so that when we hand them off to Im- ageworks, there's no guesswork. They know the texture for a character's shirt and the color skin of a monster. Then the last thing I do is a color script. We pull six to 12 frames of a sequence – the major moments of it – and we'll paint over those and do color keys, to say, 'This is the color lighting, this is the quality of lighting it should be.' If it's an action sequence, it should be very contrasty red. If it's a happy scene, it might be soer, with more ambient light, and warmer and friendlier. We try to set the appropriate lighting and color for every sequence. That's kind of the last part of the process. Is that typical for a color script? The Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs one was about eight frames. If it's a particularly long sequence, you pull more. But about eight should cover everything. Ultimately, there must be hundreds of frames that you do this for. There are thousands! All the designs for the environments, all the props, all the characters…. If they change wardrobe, each is a different painting. And the color script could be 100 or so little paintings. There is so much artwork done. How big is the team working on this? At the high point, which was last summer, 15 people. It started with me and two others. Then there were five, then eight. Then the design [work] goes down and they move on to other shows. We work in chunks. The first teaser trailer shows the guys on the tower, giving the flying lesson. We don't want to turn it over little by little. It's a package. That is so much work for them, it keeps them incredibly busy. Does the audience see more of the human world in this film? In the first movie, we saw a little bit of the human world. It was more of the third act, where we went into the town of Transylva- nia, where there was a monster fest going on, and the humans were loving the monsters and dressing up like them. And they are on an airplane at the end. That was the most we saw. This one, we really crack it wide open. We meet Johnny's family. We go back to where he grew up. That gave me an opportunity to go, 'What would the human world look like in the scheme of Hotel Transylvania?' I like contrast, and this movie is about contrast, so if you look at what was set up for the first movie, the monster world is vertical. It's very tall and kind of thin. Think of the castle, with all its columns. And light- ing-wise, lighting is very colorful in the castle and sometimes comes from under-lighting. It's really dy- namic. The contrast to that is, if the monster world is vertical, the human world is horizontal and flat. If the lighting in the monster world is dynamic and colorful, why don't we make ours kind of even and drab? And that helps support certain story ideas we were trying to get across. The characters add contrast, too. Can you point to certain scenes that demonstrate that contrast? In the 7-Eleven, Mavis stands out a little bit – this dark silhouette in this evenly neutral-colored sort IN THE MOVIE, THE HUMAN WORLD IS NEUTRAL COLORED, THE MONSTER WORLD BRIGHT, VIBRANT.