Films 4 Change – Ness

Illustrations for animation

This project was such a delight and a privilege to work on. It consisted of creating a series of illustrations of animal characters and scenery elements that would be animated for a series Ness (animations done by Films4Change). The illustrations had to be created in a way in which they could have elements such as mouths, beaks, legs that moved when the characters were turned into animations so with this requirement there were a few considerations that needed to be done with the illustrations outside the normal process.
Another consideration was that these characters also needed to be viewed from an angle that would make sense when the real-life actor was interacting with it, so there were a bit of backward on forwards sketches in order to get “camera” angles correct so that when they are put together it made sense.

My process in this project was to firstly make a trip out to the Australian Reptile Park and observe and sketch the animals I was going to draw, I spent a lot of time watching the Tassie Devils (i didn’t realise how hairy they were, even though I have seen them out there many times). It’s always so different to observe something that you will be drawing as opposed to just viewing in life. 
After a lovely day out, I moved to various rounds of rough sketches in pencil to get the angles etc correct for each character. One of the trickier ones to do was the koala as it needed to be on an angle in the tree but not obscured by the tree and also be able to be interacting with the actor. I also observed and sketched alot of trees, the ways the branches went, I knew the actress was going to be sitting on branch but as this is for screen we didn’t have a huge area vertically to work with for incorporating all the elements of branches, characters and people so there was a bit of playing involved. 

After we were comfortable with each of the sketches to a degree it then came time to doing a more refined pencil sketch. Then to adding colours which was a mixture of watercolour, inks, pencils, and pens. As I knew that these characters essentially were going to be edited digitally it meant that I could do the base work traditionally and then scan those drawings into the computer to then add to and manipulate them digitally while still retaining the traditional styles. Each character had a few different layers to their file one with mouth closed, mouth open sometimes legs and heads were moveable where it was appropriate, which I hoped would allow the studio to able to animate what they needed. Displayed on this page are some of the sketches and raw files in this process from my end. All of these were then handed over to work their magic and put all together for the final result.

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