Minimalist Character Animation
Producer Neil Holman and art director Chad Hurd detail the limited but highly stylized animation techniques they wield to devastatingly hilarious effect on their hit FX animated series.
With a move to Los Angeles and seemingly ill-fated shift from bumbling spymasters to bumbling private detectives, the dysfunctional crew of FX’s hit animated series
Has stumbled into their new season needing completely new headquarters, sets, costumes, vehicles, gear and most importantly, a fresh cast of shady and otherwise obnoxious characters. And a baby.
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Leaders on the show’s Floyd County Productions animation team are producer Neil Holman and art director Chad Hurd, together responsible for turning series creator and executive producer Adam Reed’s scripts into the finished gems we watch in giddy admiration in what is now the show’s seventh season.
Premiere. They spoke at length about many key production details and overall pipeline challenges, sharing their insights about how they keep the show looking fresh, doing justice to Reed’s creative vision, while making sure they stay on time and on budget.
Every year for the past five years, I’ve interviewed Adam [Reed, the series creator, executive producer and writer] before the start of the new season. With Season 7 set in Los Angeles, I figured new sets, new characters, great opportunity to dig into the show’s design and animation a bit. Tell me first, what are your main duties on the show?
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Chad Hurd: Right now I'm serving as the art director for the show, which means I wear a lot of hats. I'm designing the backgrounds, helping design the characters and leading the storyboard team breaking down all the shots on the pre-production side of things. It's my role to envision what the show's going to look like as soon as Adam finishes writing the script.
Neil Holman: I’m supposed to take on more of a producer role this year, but previously, I've been art director on the show since the pilot. With the art duties, once the script is written, it goes to the art director and that's really where the blueprints of the episode start to come to fruition. That's where we really lay the groundwork for the production and figure out how we're going to get from point A to point B.
Your production style is unique for a mainstream animated series. You use a limited animation production process that includes Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects for animation and compositing. Can you talk a bit about how you design and animate the show?
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NH: Let's say we have an office within the script. What Chad and I will do is research what kind of office this should be, as far as its architecture, figuring out what needs to happen in the script, where the door needs to be for characters walking, or tables, desks, etc. Then we'll build a background design that’s kind of like a dollhouse cut-away. It's really so we can figure out what kind of furniture we're going to put in - what's the aesthetic of the room. Then, we'll give that to our 3D department. 3D will take this design and build a 3D model of the environment. There's a lot of push and pull, fixing things as you go - sometimes what you laid out in your design doesn't look so good once it gets to 3D. So it's a very fluid process.
Once that 3D environment model is built we can put our camera really anywhere we want. So, we can start shooting wide shots, we can do extreme close-ups, we can use different lenses on a camera just like you can do in real life. Once we take a picture inside that 3D model, our background painters work over that picture, that render, if that makes sense.
All the angles that we figure out with our storyboard artists, we take those camera angles, plot those inside this 3D environment and kick out still images. Our background painters take those 3D-rendered images and then paint over them, working in all sorts of textures and details. They really do quite a lot to bring it to what you see as the final picture.
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CH: Another thing that's kind of interesting about our workflow is that we use a lot of photo reference for our character illustrations. Because it's such a realistic style, we'll actually dress up models in suits, or scuba gear, or whatever we need, and take reference photos to work from. We do all of our drawings here, in-house, in Adobe Illustrator. Those drawings are turned into puppets, so if Archer's going to move his arm around we'll put those rotation points at his forearm and wrist so that we can economize how many drawings we need. Those drawings then will go into Adobe After Effects where we actually do the animation.
NH: After Effects is where all these separate pieces, the character illustrations, the background paintings, sometimes a 3D animated car, all come together. That's where we really start composing the show. They take color and lighting passes over the whole composite of the show, where they'll really add a lot of finishing details, like an atmosphere or moving clouds. It’s impressive what they can turn all these pieces into.
And a lot of the primetime cartoons do and because of that, we work a lot faster. Our pipeline is really built for speed. The average timeline on an episode is somewhere around 11 weeks. It can balloon up to 13 weeks, but that's about our entire production on an episode. Some primetime cartoons that are on Fox, those big name cartoons, they take about nine months per episode.
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Because all of our staff is in-house, we can pivot really quickly. It doesn't take much for us to turn the ship around if we need to address something, or something's not working out once we see it in edit. It’s not that hard to make changes. It's not fun, but it doesn't take a month to correct an issue.
CH: Because we're all in the same house, if a problem arises, I can just walk out my office door, two rows of desks down, and ask for that change. We really pivot hard on a dime if we have to.
CH: A lot of efficiency and a lot of control, too. We can talk to our department leads and combine our resources to figure out how something's going to work. It's pretty collaborative and gives us a lot of control over the final look of the show.
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Considering that Adam does almost all the writing, how early does he share, Well it looks like we're gonna have these new characters, these environments, things like that?
NH: We don’t normally see things until he finishes a script, when he turns it in to FX. Sometimes it's a big surprise, other times he gives us a little bit of a heads-up. I can remember way back in Season 3 when we went to space in the finale and he gave us a little heads-up that we needed to design an interior of a space station without giving us any specifics [laughs]. You can only design so much blind. Most of the time we just wait until he finishes a script and then start working it.
Speaking of finished scripts, Archer and crew move to Los Angeles this season. That means a huge number of new characters, sets, costumes and other assets. But the main characters don’t really change from season to season. How much refinement do you do each year? Are you still able to use some of the same visual material you've used in previous years?
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CH: Every year at the end of the season we take a look at our library of all the different assets we’ve built and decide if it's good enough or not to go on to the next season. Lately, the last few years, we've been doing quite a bit more redraws and this season is no exception. With a new Los Angeles background and new outfits that they're going to be wearing it was kind of a total redraw. The style's still the same. We know how to draw that Archer style, but the cut of their clothes are different, they've got a lot of different hairstyles, the aesthetic of the backgrounds has changed somewhat. We're always trying to up our game from the previous year. Sometimes, like in Season 5, they're just wearing totally different outfits and that's a different beast you have to tackle.
So how do you handle the design process? You've got a script, new stuff needed for each episode, other stuff that won’t change all season long. Los Angeles affords you a whole new opportunity for just about everything.
NH: Adam was a costume minor in college and because of that he really has a specific vision of what he sees for the characters. We do a lot of research and we throw a lot of designs at Adam and he gives us feedback. Sometimes it's a thumbs up that we nailed it right out of the gate. Sometimes it takes
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