OWN PROJECTS

It’s so much more fun to design your own movies. Unfortunately, there is never enough time to do that when you are involved in your day-to-day job. Because nobody tells you what you have to do to please everybody upstairs, you have the pure freedom and can create looks you always wanted to explore. Usually artists are very critical toward themselves, so it is quite challenging to come up with something you, as your own client, like.

The title Own Projects is a little bit misleading; better would be Your Own Crazy Ideas nobody will ever want to produce. Thats OK. I always created these imaginary projects to find ways to escape the sometimes boring “income”-work.

Another interesting thing is that you never finish your own dream projects. You create tons of designs until something interrupts the process. You stop for a while and then follow a new idea. But usually after a while you return to the drawer where you collect all the unfinished future Oscar nominations. I go through all my old stuff once in a while, sometimes after several years. It’s a bit nostalgic at first, but then you dive right back into the creative process and change designs, add little things, improve characters. It’s amazing. You realize how much you have learned during the intervening time. You improve on what you once thought was a masterpiece.

For a long time I used these challenging ideas to learn. I never enjoyed just reading about a new technique or a famous artist and his work. I wanted to get something out of this experience. You look at a new Picasso exhibition catalogue and you are so full of the work of this genius that you have to start sketching and painting with all your overflowing creativity. The same thing happens to me when I see a beautiful landscape or architecture, read a good story or see a well-done movie.

Recently I started teaching again after about 15 years. That is something else that kicks you forward, it is not really teaching, it is learning with the students. During that time you develop so many ideas that it is nearly impossible to remember them all after the lectures and work sessions. But one thing you keep with you is the energy and the motivation to create something new, as if you were back in school the way you were so many years ago.

When I am looking for a new style, I try to combine very unusual ingredients, occasionally even using computer-generated images as in this example. The different elements were created with a software called Artmatic, but then manipulated in Photoshop. Most of the time it is not quite clear what the end result will look like. That makes the process even more interesting.

Back in 1989, I did a children’s book that was never published. These are designs based on that book. After a few weeks of communicating with publishers I did not care for, I stopped all attempts to get the book printed.

Recently, I did some more work on it and now it looks like it will be an animated short. It is fun to do the designs with very loose brushwork and some Photoshop coloring.

This is a little bit of my personal history. In a way, that’s how it all started! It says in one corner of this painting, 1965. I was 16 and I remember when and why I did this little style-study I had seen an animated theatrical short in front of a live action feature film. For a long time I tried to find out about the studio that had produced it, I guess it must have been Zagreb Studio. The style of the backgrounds were fascinating. I found it very unusual because I was used to more realistic looking scenery in the older Disney movies. As soon as I was home, I tried to copy what I had seen and it changed my preferences in animation for a long time. From then on, I was more attracted to the Hubley shorts, everything that came from Zagreb Studio, UPA and Lenica in Germany. Even today I am more attracted to very stylized movies and try to create something new and unusual all the time.

UNPRODUCTIVE

A production designer is one of the department heads and has to attend meetings where decisions about the movie have to be made.

There are endless, sometimes never-ending meetings. You have to be in a lot of them: Story, workbook, brain trust, layout, background, color, effects and sweatbox meetings. I am sure I forgot a few.

You can imagine some of the drawings you do during that time are not always productive, but good for a fun break. Sometimes you are just over-creative and all that energy has to go somewhere.

I was very fortunate to have had a chance to work with some very funny artists in this business. One of them was Barry Cook, who directed Mulan together with Tony Bancroft.

Barry and I attended hundreds of meetings about the look of the film, especially very early meetings via satellite link with the Florida studio. And there were a lot of funny sketches besides our work stuff Here is a collection of some of them…