Arlo the alligator boy - Feature + Series
STUDIO / Titmouse Inc.
CLIENT / Netflix
ROLE / Background Paint Supervisor
I worked on an amazing musical feature film called Arlo the Alligator Boy for Netflix! Also the series!
I managed a team of 5-7 painters on the movie and a team of 6 painters and an outsource team on the series. I helped to keep the style of the project consistent while also creating and organizing paintings myself along with color scripts and lighting guides!
I also helped in the 3D concepting of vehicles and translating the 2D painted texture into the 3D space. This was super fun!
Howdy!
My first ever experience on a feature film! I had so much fun working on this unique project with the nicest people in animation. Director Ryan Crego really set the mood with his vision and directing style where he invited everyone to bring not only their A game but bring a little bit of themselves into the film. I really felt everyone pouring their hearts into the film while also having a blast.
This project is very unique in my career as it’s a style that I’ve never really worked in. The fine folks at Titmouse really put a lot of trust in me to lead the BG paint team and I’m really glad they did as it gave me the opportunity to try something new. I picked up a lot of new skills whilst working on the feature film and also the series. Here are some of the BG paints that I got the opportunity to paint. I only worked on the painting portion and the layouts were done by the layout team.
feeling the look
Early on when I first started on this project, I knew that I was going to struggle as the visual style for this project is so far from what I’ve usually worked on. I also knew that I was entrusted to lead a team of painters, so I needed to figure out how to learn the style and know it inside and out and I knew I didn’t have the luxury of time either as the team started soon! To fast track my understanding of the style, I looked at a couple of the keys from the project and then just created a scene for myself, which doesn’t exist in the movie, series or anywhere else. I just wanted to “feel” the style and get comfortable with using things like stamp textures, minimal rendering, simpler shapes and more graphic representation of details.
3D
For a 2D film, I sure worked a lot in 3D! The team at Titmouse knew I loved tinkering with Blender so they tasked me with helping out to integrate the 3D vehicles into the world. I textured all these 3D assets in Blender and created exports for the team. As the BG paint supervisor, I was very experienced in how the painting style was for the film so texturing the 3D assets felt very natural. I loved doing the look dev to make sure there are enough “imperfections” so that the 3D assets don’t seem too…3D! It was definitely a fun challenge to make the models look super 2D and I’m very proud of how it turned out in the final movie and series.
In this section, I only worked on 3D texturing, 2D integration and look dev of the vehicles. All BG layout and BG paint was not done by me. I also modeled that wonky looking Arlo model, which became a handy size comp.
color script
This technically was not my task but I expressed that I wanted to try new things on the project and so Israel Sanchez, the art director on Arlo, asked if I wanted to take a stab at the color script for the “Follow me Home"“ song. I was super excited but also nervous as now I had to prove I could do it! When working on this color script, I went back to the basic idea of “story is king” and just worked colors, mood, pacing and composition around the storytelling. I felt that this was such a sweet moment for Bertie, the character from the movie, as up until this song, she was quite reserved and a “lone wolf”. So I wanted to keep the starting bit of the color script quiet and “alone”, just her and her thoughts. As she starts losing hope, Arlo comes in and adds a touch of color, vibrancy and pop! As she starts to be more comfortable with the idea of opening up to relationships like a friendship, they start to gel and there is a little bio luminescence color storm swirling around them. Then when all the friends join in, the palette is amplified and it feels like they are in a world of their own. And with that surge of energy, a family is born.
teamwork makes the dream work
I loved collaborating with other departments to make the movie better and better. We would sometimes run into a visual problems and would need a solution quickly. Coming from a concept art background, it was very natural for me to just quickly concept out a solution and pitch it to the team.
End credits
One of the coolest tasks I got on the feature film was to paint the end credits! All these amazing layouts were created by the legendary Israel Sanchez and I handled all the painting.
