WWII Film Backgrounds

In this post, I want to describe our process for creating the backgrounds in our new film.  As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the look we wanted was that of Willem Den Ouden's dark, moody etchings.  Starting with my rough sketches, Iandry and Tom Witte created paintings and drawings for the various scenes.

drawings by Tom Witte

One of Iandry's paintings

Tom and Iandry nailed it, these were exactly what the film needed.  Tom added things like the mist in the trees, pushing me to get that kind of rich ambiance into the whole film.  Iandry's paintings are remarkable; he has that touch with the brush which comes from serious discipline and produces really rich images.

After those were done, I went back over them in Photoshop, building them up by layering the different drawings and paintings together with high resolution scans of granular substances like the pencil shavings, white flour and eraser bits you see here.

I've posted a few of the final backgrounds here.

I wanna send a big shoutout to Alex Fogarty, who taught me a lot about doing this stuff in Photoshop.  Alex was the lead designer who showed me the ropes at Little Airplane while we were working on "The Wonder Pets!"  She was extremely generous with me.