OLYMPUS

I worked in preproduction on Hercules for about six months. John Musker and Ron Clements were the directors. We had worked together on Aladdin. Andy Gaskill was the assigned art director. My job was to develop a few style ideas over a short term. Andy and I did a complete color-script together. He created all the incredible thumbnails like a miniature storyboard within a very short time. Most of them were drawn right on the script pages. I loved his work.

From every page, I selected some sketches as keys and colored them. That’s how the color script was finally developed. Afterward, I developed an abstract color continuity script. It was fun to work on something so different from all the previous movies I had been involved in. Nothing in that script was serious; it was pure sitcom.

It was not one of my favorites as there was too much talking, but there were some great characters like Hades.

To design some of that environment was interesting as well. The old classic Greek world was not taken seriously at all. We studied a lot of antique vases. Even the way humans were drawn on the

vases influenced the characters in the movie. In general there were a lot of very challenging environments, like Hades (the underworld) and Olympus, residence of the Greek gods.

Some amazing freelance artists were involved, such as Bruce Zick, Gay Lawrence, and Valerio Ventura. A lot of their work influenced the final look of the movie.

Shortly before I left to work exclusively on Mulan, Gerald Scarfe joined the team and took over the designing of the characters and in part the look of the movie.