We have started exploring ways to achieve James watercolour look throughout as we tread the balance between artistic vision and budgeting and scheduling parameters. Combing textured watercolour backgrounds with flat characters have been a challenge explored in drawn animation since the 1930s. While today’s technology offers solutions, no texture brush is going to ever compete with a hand-painted watercolour in James skilled hand. So James has painted a few quick character studies to see if we can find a solution that’s fast enough to be practical. We’ve been testing these in the evolving animatic, and what we are discovering is the detail in these images mean we can vastly reduce the number of poses because watercolour gives its own life. We need to explore this further, but we feel if we can pull it off, it will give a really unique look and feel.
