Production Backgrounds

Although many of our crew members are just starting out in animation, and working on this documentary is a way for them to get a good credit early in their careers, quite a few animation professionals have joined our crew as well, mainly because they’re big fans of UPA and just want to help.  Matt Jones from Pixar is one of those.  He was assigned to design backgrounds for the Gerald Hop scene, one of which can be seen above.  Matt sketched out several of the buildings along Hollywood Boulevard for one of our scenes, which became the examples for the final design, which in this case were created by Andrea Rosales.

Backgrounds were a big deal at UPA, often looking far more like a Picasso painting than a traditional animation background of that era, so, we have put a special emphasis on doing backgrounds that look like designs that some of the artists at UPA might have created, like, Paul Julian, Jules Engel, Bob McIntosh, Herb Klynn, and others.  Some of the first backgrounds for the documentary were created in the Woodbury animation production class, but much has been done since.  At this writing we’re having a lot of fun with a particular scene where we will have one of the characters take down a traditional styled background and replace it with a UPA background.  We’re having so much fun, we’re so anxious to get this documentary finished and seen by the public, it’s going to be great, at least that’s how we’re feeling.

Category: Production