El Frederico

"Tom & Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes"

2010-10-17T23:06:00.000-07:00

In 2009, I had the pleasure to work at Warner Bros (again) on a new Tom & Jerry project. This "direct to dvd" feature was directed by an old friend, Jeff Siergey. I had worked with Jeff on many projects over the years, from Tiny Toons and Animaniacs to Space Jam. Spike Brandt (another old friend from WB) would produce and serve as creative consultant on the film. I was brought in to Production Design the "Tom & Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1722638/) and deliver a look that was inspired by the old MGM Tom & Jerry shorts of the 1940s, in particular... "Dr Jeckle and Mr. Mouse" (1947) and "Mouse In Manhattan" (1945). In my opinion, these two episodes represent the best of the series and we arguably the MOST memorable.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1722638/

No coincidence that this project was being developed at the same time Guy Ritchie's, "Sherlock Holmes" was being filmed with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. As images of this exciting new film were being released, our crew was surprised at the similarities of the two productions and their content. I initially thought of setting the film in the earlier years of Homes' investigative work, 1880-85... but seeing the set pieces from the Ritchie movie caused me to rethink the period and include a version of the London Tower Bridge under construction. This would place the two films in the same world. That would be just the beginning of references to the Holmes world of film and literature. I tried to include a reference to Tom & Jerry or Sherlock Holmes in almost every design. At this point, the Production Design took on a life of it's own.

The project started out with me being the Production Designer as well as the sole Background Designer, Layout Artist and Prop Designer. It quickly became apparent that I had more work than I was able to finish in my 6-8 months of production.

The first 2 months were spent designing and laying out every background for the first few sequences. As time passed, I focused on key establishing shots and major prop designs. By the end of production, I was roughing out designs for animators to work on and designing larger set pieces that set the period and location of the film (1890 London).

What I have posted in this blog is a brief collection of the hundreds of designs and drawings I did for "Tom & Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes".

This is the first time I have worked on a "Tom & Jerry" cartoon... I hope it is the first of many.

"Tom & Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes" can be purchased on Blu-ray and DVD at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Jerry-Sherlock-Holmes-Blu-ray-Digital/dp/B0040MO90Q/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1287381846&sr=8-2

"West In Pieces"

2010-09-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

"West In Pieces" was the last episode (#606) of The Powerpuff Girls. I had the GREAT opportunity to design all of the backgrounds for the finale to a terrific series. This episode was very different from any prior, because it takes place in the Old West and the characters are all reimagined for the 1860s period. I really enjoyed redesigning all of the iconic locations with a western influence. I worked with the great storyboard artist, Chris Reccardi and background painter, Chris Rozak to design the look which I describe as a "Western Little Golden Book". This episode aired as a Season 6 (Episode 7) cartoon on July 30, 2004 as a rare 2 part... most episodes were :11 min each.

I had a little extra time to take the background designs to a new level of refinement that I really didn't have time to attempt before. I laid out most of the backgrounds to the character poses in Chris Reccardi's board and I took time to render almost every drawing!

Everything in the city of Townsville is made out of wood planks and riveted steel. I really pushed the look of the clouds to resemble the embroidered motif on western shirts.


	"Townsville" Main St. Design


Reimagining of Prof. Newtonium's House

... In 2005, I received the Emmy Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for Background Design". It was a great year for Cartoon Network as we swept the Emmys that year.

"The Mouse That Soared" (Part 1)

2010-09-08T18:58:00.000-07:00

"The Mouse That Soared", originally known as "Wing Nuts", is a CG animated short produced by a large group of talented artist that used to live in Portland, OR and work at the CG division of Laika Studios. This short has won close to 50 awards to date and screens at film festivals all around the country and around the world.

www.themousethatsoared.com

The main cast of characters, 2 young bluebirds, share a nest on the rooftop of a steam-powered sawmill in the forest of Central Oregon. They are supposed to be brothers, though many people assume they are a married or gay couple. Which ever is funnier works for me!

Production Design: Frederick Gardner
Character Design by: Frederick Gardner, Chris Sasaki and Ovi Nedelcu

Color Design by: Scott Fassett

Directed by: Kyle Bell

More "Powerpuff"

2010-08-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

These are a few background designs for "The Powerpuff Girls" series at Cartoon Network. These designs were done for the third season (I think) in 2000.

One of the designs is for Professor Newtonium's dorm room in college. I based this drawing on my "dorm room experiences" at CalArts.

Design for Hercules

2010-08-04T19:14:00.000-07:00

In 1997, I accepted a job at Walt Disney TV Animation to be Head of the Layout Dept and work on "Hercules" and other shows.

We worked on the series at the same time the movie was in production. The series allowed me great freedom to continue exploring the look of the film established by Andy Gaskill and Bruce Zick. I learned a tremendous amount about the history of Greece and Greek Mythology. It was really important for me to stay true to the source material (Hercules style guide) and pay homage to the Greek art and architecture of the 8th to 6th centuries BC.

"The Life and Times of Juniper Lee" (Part 1)

2010-08-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

In 2004, I was hired at Cartoon Network to work on a new series in development, "Juniper Lee". This was a great opportunity for me to reunite with some old animation friends, Alan Bodner (Warner Bros Classics, Iron Giant), Frank Squilacci (Big Guy and Rusty), Steve Lewis (Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, WB Classics) to create the look of a new series from a blank page. To that date, the shows I had worked on at Cartoon Network were all well established visually (Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack)... so I was anxious to try something new.

I had a few interesting design issues to address with "Juniper Lee": first, the show took place in San Francisco, a challenging location to draw for tv with its elegant architecture and rolling hills. Second, the show starred characters of Chinese origin... I wanted to make sure this interesting aspect of design was NOT overlooked. Third, the main characters were "witches"... this was the most exciting and inspired part of the design challenge. I took these three ingredients (San Francisco Victorian architecture, Chinese design motifs and witchcraft) and tried to serve each visually. I really grew to like the design direction the show was going in. I had the rare chance on this show to really explore a few locations in complete detail. By the second season, I had won an Emmy for Background Design on "Juniper Lee" (the only one in the series).

You can see a big influence of my prior work in these designs. Warner Bros classic cartoons (Maurice Noble), Dan Krall's art direction on "Powerpuff" and my own affection for bold shape and strong silhouettes were a big inspiration for me. This is a small cross section of the background designs and visual development for the series...

Mojo's Lair

2010-05-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

This is one of my background designs for Mojo's Lair used in "The Powerpuff Girls" movie. This design shows Mojo Jojo's monkey mind control panel. He uses it to create his primate army.

I had worked on PPG for several years and was excited we were finally doing a movie (first for Cartoon Network). A lot of great artists worked on the film. The style (Art Directed by my friend, Mike Moon) was a creative mix of 2D and 3D (CG).

Pinecone Peak

2010-05-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

In one of the last versions of the script for the film, "Jack & Ben", our main characters travel to a location referred to as "Pinecone Peak". I was asked to explore the look of this location.

At first, I designed some pretty realistic locations, as based on the storyboards... but then I thought, "how do the birds know what Pinecone Peak is? They can't read a map!" So that's when I was inspired to do something more literal and surreal. "Perhaps the peak is named for the bizarre way it looks, not because of the trees on its surface!" That is how I came up with the designs for this location. As you can see, some are more subtle than others. I would like to see all of them in an animated film.

Stylizing Trees

2010-05-29T23:09:00.000-07:00

From 2006-2009, I worked on a CG animated film called, Jack and Ben at Laika Studios. The project was never completed and CG animation production was stopped. During that 2 and a half year period, I had the great fortune of being able to pursue a number of different styles for a single film.

What you see here are the fourth and fifth iterations of design for this film as directed by Barry Cook. I spent a number of weeks exploring tree shapes and textures. I wanted to find a unique way of distilling a particular species of tree into it's most basic shape language. These are some of those explorations.

MORE Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

2010-05-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

Here is some more of my work from the series "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot". The series never aired all of the episodes created for both seasons. It's run was cut short because Fox executives deemed the series to be too violent! I guess they had never seen the comic book on which this series was based. Some of the designs here are from the "lost" second season. All of the episodes can be found on on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U6yvbgtVm0). As the series progressed, the writers penned episodes that took our characters to locations never seen in the comics created by Geoff Darrow and Frank Miller. The comic series originally took place entirely in a futuristic version of Tokyo. The animated series took place in a fictitious metropolis called, New Tronic City which was a stylized merging of Tokyo, New York and Chicago of the future. It was a challenge to continue this detail-heavy production design in a primordial jungle or underground volcano complex, but I think we succeeded.

Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

2010-03-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

After my work on "The Iron Giant", I was hired to work on a new show at Sony Television, "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot" (1999). To this day, it remains the most challenging and painstaking production I have worked on.

The show was based on the comic, "Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot" by Geoff Darrow. My job was to design the animated series to directly reflect the look and style of Geoff Darrow's incredible drawings from the comic series. I had been a fan of Darrows for years and was excited at the prospect of bringing this great comic to tv... WITHOUT watering it down!

As you can see from some of my designs, I was also heavily influenced by "Hard Boiled". I used elements of both in the show and lots of 1940s and 50s car parts. Each background designer on the show had to design and rough out his own background. After it was approved by me and the director, the designs were inked! This is a departure from Geoff Darrow's comics which are finished in a very soft pencil. Inking the designs allowed us to maintain a continuity in the overall look.

Sadly, the show was canceled before all 24 episodes were aired due to the extreme violence portrayed. Go figure?

Contour Continuation

2009-10-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

Early in school at CalArts, I learned to watch for tangents in my designs. My instructors, Bob Winquist and Mike Giamo, would train us to recognize these design errors and avoid them at all costs.

As I studied animation throughout the years, I noticed some artists would intentionally create tangents to make a design statement. the result is, in my opinion, visually striking. I started using this "Contour Continuation" technique as a background designer at Warner Bros Classics. Contour Continuation is the lining up of shapes to continue a contour (or directional element) across the composition. Sometimes this technique is extremely successful and beautiful, other times, it is subtle and almost invisible.

This background design was for a theatrical short, "Nina the Hyena", directed by Disney animator, Dave Kuhn. The look was graphic and stylized. The environment was the African savanna during severe drought. My challenge was to create something visually unique that did NOT resemble "The Lion King".

I have used "Contour Continuation" to create a flowing rhythm to the composition. As the camera pans through the scene, the landscape "flows" by the camera like water so lacking in the environment. Pay particular attention to the dead tree branches hugging the contour of the hills behind them.

Production Design: Frederick Gardner

Transparency, Texture & Color Reversal

2009-10-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I was doing some experimentation in Visual Development with the amazing Disney Artist/Painter, Scott Fassett. Using my background in design from Warner Bros and Cartoon Network, I wanted to incorporate some tricks I had used (and had seen used by Art Directors on popular 2D productions) in a CG environment. Scott brought his fine art and Disney influences and, together, we developed a re-imagined classic cartoon look.

This painting highlights some subtle, yet complex details used by Picasso, Maurice Noble and Eyvind Earle. Self colored lines and the sponge tool (in Photoshop) we liberally used to create a "hand painted" look. The sponge broadens the range of color and brings a richness to the digital canvas. You will notice the posters on the wall and telephone pole are transparent. The colors are influenced by overlapping each other and the surface they are on. The lettering on some of the posters reverses in shadow or when overlapped by another poster. This is subtle, but brings a sophistication to an otherwise mundane street scene. The wood grain on the telephone pole and the grout in the wall also reverse (light to dark) in the shadow. I really wanted to use a lot of modern art techniques in the final look of our visual tests.

Something else Scott and I really enjoyed exploring was the use of color panels. These "color panels" (used with great success in Disney's Sword in the Stone and 101 Dalmations) allow for subtle color shifts in the "half light" are of the subject matter I think it creates a real "luminous" quality you would otherwise miss using flat color or traditional mixed color. You can see examples of the "color panels" on the Bus Stop bench, the telephone pole and the wood fence on the left of the image.

Production Design: Frederick Gardner
Art Direction: Scott Fassett

Prop Test - Part II

2009-10-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

This is another part of the prop test I did for Cartoon Network a while back.

This part of the test required me to design an "Anime-style" tank and show it being destroyed by a "monster". I think the Israelis have one of the most advanced Main Battle Tanks in the world. Using the Israeli Merkava Tank as inspiration, I played with the proportions until I cam up with something I though looked plausible, modern and cool. Doing the destroyed version of the tank was a "blast"!

Prop Test

2009-10-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

This is a Prop Test I did a while ago for a new show at Cartoon Network.

This part of the test required me to design a "Stealth Ship". Following the basic design in the storyboard, I used the basic shape as my starting point for the first few sketches. As you can see, it didn't take long for me to go in a number of different directions. None of the designs ended up being used, but I think this test shows my thought process and exploration of a design.

I decided to post designs that were successful as well as some, not so successful. Overall, I had fun doing the test, and I think it shows. I think?

The "Stealth Fighter #18" (the ship that looks like a Cicada Fly) was my favorite, because it is so different from what you would expect to see.

1800's Carriage Designs

2009-09-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

These are some carriage studies I did a few months ago for a project at Warner Bros. These particular carriages were not used. I really liked playing with the shapes of the "cabs". There are some very elegant lines in the vehicles from this period. I think if I pushed these designs further, I would really contrast the proportions of the wheels to the cabs.

Gators

2009-06-18T00:11:00.000-07:00

I was working on visual development for a "Gator Farm" and kinda fell in love with drawing alligators. My friends, Ovi Nedelcu and Chris Sasaki did some amazing alligators too. I was really great to see everyone's different take.

Graveyard Angels

2009-06-17T23:57:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, I was working on designs for a graveyard and thought it would be visually exciting for most of the gravestones to have wings of some kind. I was inspired my grave stones from cemeteries in the South. I really liked the idea of these angels as "guardians" of the cemetery.

Log Tugger

2009-06-11T22:18:00.001-07:00

One of the many cool things about living in Oregon, is all the amazing history just laying in fields or on the side of the road. While driving on the highway, I saw this amazing old truck sitting in a field, covered in blackberry vines. After doing a bit of research, I found out this old truck was used in the logging industry as "tugger". My understanding is, it was used to pull felled trees from the woods into open fields where they could be loaded onto logging trucks.

1965 Mercury Comet

2009-06-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

I love the '65 Mercury Comet. It is the "ideal" family station wagon.

Scary Wallpaper

2009-06-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

This is some "Scary Wallpaper" I designed for a CG demo reel. I wanted the wallpaper in this old house to be subtly uncomfortable. The painting of this looks amazing, you have to look really hard to see the skulls! This pattern might make cool pajamas.

Fisherman's House

2009-06-11T17:04:00.001-07:00

These are a few takes on one of the villager's homes. The dwellings in this village are supposed to look rustic and timeless. I figure the poor people who live here are satisfied with the little they have and don't really aspire to much. I tried to show some of that in these sketches. These designs are intentionally loose, and serve as conceptual drawings to help the director visualize the short story he was working from.

Old Fishing Village

2009-06-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

This is a design for a fishing village for an animated short I was working on in Portland. The time period for the short is supposed to be pretty vague. I was inspired by Cuban fishing villages of the 30s and 40s and border areas of Tijuana, Mexico.