Droids Layout Backgrounds


Here is a rough animation pose from the first show called "The White Witch" which was a racing speeder owned by Thall.

In this scene, R2 is hanging upside down from a magnetic platform. The gizmo sticking out is a welding torch. He's working on the speeder in Thall's garage.

In order to speed up production, the layout artists were divided into two categories: Senior Layout Artist and Assistant Layout Artist. The Senior artist was the one with more experience or drawing ability as far as roughing out the scenes. The Assistant was the artist better at the clean up of the drawings.

Each Senior artist had an Assistant. The Senior artist would draw the layouts at 6 field size in rough and then give them to the Assistant, who would enlarge the drawings and clean them up at their full size.



Here are two sheets of layout thumbnails that I would make up as I was working on each show.

After I had completed the layout for each scene, I would photocopy it and then paste it onto a sheet. I'd continue to add the layouts and then use them for reference as I went along. This way I had a handy visual reference of all the layouts within my sequence. I could compare them to make sure the spatial relationships were close enough to each other as well as checking to be sure all the detailing was accurate.

I also made adjustments where necessary within the sequence to try and cut down on any uneccessary new backgrounds. If a shot could be done reusing an existing background, I'd do it.

The top three on the second page are the same as the bottom 3 on the top page (did you notice that?).

These are all from the 5th show in the series (you can see the number labeled under each layout i.e. D - 5 - 22. This stands for "Droids - 5th show - scene 22").




Previous Page

Next Page

Droids Index

Portfolio Page

Homepage