Yeah!!! Umigo was released today!! -What I did as a Director at Wild Brain

Recently I directed an educational cartoon series at Wild Brain.

Here is a little inside look at what I did as a director.

Yeah!!!  Umigo was released today!!

These are thumbnails that I drew for the storyboard artist.  The storyboard artist would be given 2 weeks to complete a 3 minute music video with a 1 minute intro.  The script for the intro was usually not locked until after the board was taken to a dialog record.  

Next, I work with the board artist to lock down a final board.  I would usually do my own revisions after the first pass of revisions.  On my final pass of the storyboard, I would fill in the director notes for overseas.  This Studio did not know how to use x-sheets, so I had to come up with a lot of  tricks and short cuts to help teach the overseas studio the style of the show quickly.    Jim Smith boarded this episode.  

Once the storyboard was completed Designs and BGs were accomplished in house, supervised by Art Director Rae McCarson and myself.  I was very lucky to have the amazing talents of Carey Yost and Mile Thomson on this episode. The Designs pictured below are by Carey.  ( I only drew designs when we were backed up.) I worked with the designers and art director to make sure all designs functioned well in flash and kept a record of all designs in my head for reuse on future episodes.  Eventually we were able to create a season 2 design library, but  by then of course the season was wrapping up.  :)

Clean Up and Animation were done overseas by TopDraw.  They did a pretty good job.  Sometimes there were scenes that they just could not understand.  In those cases Adam Rosette (lead in house animator) and I would re-animate or tweak the scene.  We had 24 hours to turn around notes and call creative retakes.

Below is a scene that I worked on in house.

After an number of weeks pass and countless late nights we get a complete music video. Thank you to everyone at wild brain who made these videos possible.  Below is a link to a near complete version of Rocket Box.  I will update this once the video has an official release in  October.

The song features Bootsy Collins (singing and Bass Guitar)

Thanks for watching

Pez