So now that Ratatouille is finally out on DVD I thought it would be fun to take a few screen grabs off the DVD of the 2-D animation that we did for the movie and post them. Now these obviously aren't the complete credits of the film, but just the first few to show the style we chose to go with. The Idea really came from Harley Jessup the Production Designer who saw some of my illustrative design work on Ratatouille and wanted to pitch the art as an Idea for a credits sequence. And as we moved forward Teddy Newton came up with all the gags for the sequence and keyed out a lot of the animation, I created the style, design and look of the sequence as well as painted some of the animation and layouts for the sequence, Scott Morse helped me paint some of the BG's, Bob Scott led the animation team, and Andrew Jimenez put everything through AfterEffects and created all the camera moves. There were way more than the five of us that helped make this happen so I have to tip my hat to them because they all did an amazing job. Everything was animated by hand, and since we wanted such a painterly look on the finished animation, we had to paint all the animation in a futuristic old fashioned way, all in the computer, but frame by frame in photoshop with no cheats or short cuts. Unfortunately we didn't get to use any cell painting gloves, maybe next time.
As for the Short film "Your Friend the Rat," Jim Capabianco had this great idea about the history of rats and humans and wanted to do most of it with hand drawn animation. Doing the production design for this short was tons of fun but was also quite challanging with trying to incorporate several different styles of animation all in under 11 minutes. In the end we used a combination of 3-d animation, 2-d animation, stop motion animation, and AfterEffects animation. There also is a shot in the short that we actually projected animation and traced it frame by frame on a large chalk board. It took me 13 hours to do and I swear I was coughing chalk for a few days after, so it's not some fancy animation filter, trust me it's all real chalk. Anyways if you pick up the DVD, I hope you enjoy it.
Viva la 2-D Animacion!
