William Dunn sent me a quick e-mail to let me know about a new paint blog he’s started on Flickr showcasing his background work on Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Not only do you get to see the environments the animated characters move around in, you also get a lot of insight into the process, and behind the scenes info.
I think I might have taken a day or two to do the samples and at the time, I was really keen on pushing the comic bookness of the backgrounds. So I thought, what is more comic bookish than zip-a-tone dot patterns? When I showed the samples to James, whereas he thought it was kind of cool, he pointed out that if we trucked into a background, what would look like a small dot from far away, would look like a bunch of large dinner plates close up. Plus there might be a problem if the camera pans along the dot pattern. It could vibrate on the screen. He was right of coarse and so I dropped the zip-a-tone idea from the BGs. This is what development is for anyway. Throw a bunch of ideas and see what works and what doesn’t. Still…I thought if I ever got on to the show, it would be cool if I could sneak it in to a BG at least once…A few weeks after I turned in my test, line producer Amy McKenna called me and told me I had the job.
