BDM 125, BDM126, Animation Reviews, Week of 15 March

 Weekend binge knit/watch: Archer
(TV series 2009-)  "At ISIS, an international spy agency, global crises are merely opportunities for its highly trained employees to confuse, undermine, betray and royally screw each other."   Now, there's a Logline!  Production companies:  FX Productions, Floyd County Productions, Radical Axis, Trinity Summit.
Showrunner/writer Adam Reed.

I like the lush paintings in the background and attention to detail.  I like how the characters have dark lines around them and strong highlight, midtones, and stylish shadows.  They never get lost on the screen and the two styles totally mesh.  (I can see using this balance of set and character design in "Monkey Saves the DayPaint!")  There are great costume, hair and set choices.  And it's funny.

The writers write to the show's animation limitations.  How Archer Gets Made has an excellent storyboard showing a sequence of talking heads (cheap and easy to make) followed by a jeep rolling through a jungle (expensive to make and where the most bang for the buck comes from in the scene). 

Floyd County Productions art director Neal Holman and animation director Bryan Fordney in Animating 'Archer' 
How do they make the sets?
NH: The way we get a design going is Chad Hurd and I will work on something that we think best suits the needs of the scripts and the aesthetic that Adam is going for in his scene.  We’ll get his thoughts on it and once a design is locked, we give it to our 3D team and they build that environment.  Once it’s built, we can put our camera anywhere inside it and kick out a render and then pass it on to our background team, our painters, who paint over that render.  So, it’s not just an out-of-the-box render that goes straight to television.  It goes through our painters first so it looks more like a painting than it does a stale 3D render.

What program do they use to make the characters move?
BF:  We use Adobe After Effects for the character acting, which is almost more similar to 3D animation than it is to traditional animation because we are essentially creating rigs, like 3D character puppets, but we are doing it in 2D.
NH:  Adobe Illustrator is where we’re building all of the elements for the character rigs.  We’ll draw Archer standing in a tuxedo, but that one illustration of Archer in his tuxedo is split up into several different layers, so that his hand is on a layer, his forearm is on a layer, his bicep is on a layer, etc.  In After Effects, we’ll link those three layers together, so that when I move the bicep, the forearm and the hand move with it.  It becomes like a puppet rig.

More research articles:  
 Adam Reed on writing for 'Archer'
Adam Reed talks Archer: intereview on AWN
The Twisted Genius Behind Sterling Archer