A Road Runner color call out, full color in black and white. COLOR REFLECTING PERSONALITY Maurice taught us, “Before getting too far with the character’scolor, it’simportant to understand whatyou are designing for. It’s not enough tomake the characterslook ‘pretty.’ The colors and values need to conveythe personality of the character.”He then challenged usto think about any of the great Warner’scharacters and how theircolorsreflected their personalities. Several easy examplescame tomind. Bugs Bunny’scoloring isfairly neutral—gray and white, with pink accents—and reflects hisstable,cool,calmdemeanor. The subtle use ofvalue emphasizesthe delicate, multifaceted aspect of his personality. Daffy, on the other hand, is not a subtle character.He iscolored with black and orange, with white accents. Asin dynamite, his high-contrast orange and black colorsreflect the explosive nature of his personality.
Though Elmer Fudd donnedmany different outfits over the years, one thing that remained consistent was his baby-like skin tones, which in turn emphasized the baby-like naïveté of his personality. Maurice then threw in another little detail. “It’simportant to keep inmind that not every charactercan, orshould be, the star of the film. If allyourcharacters have equal presence on the screen, they aren’t going to be nearly asstrong, or interesting.” The beauty of the Warner Bros.charactersisthat they were designed in a waythat they could be placed in a wide variety ofsettings and all read well. Many were also designed to work together in pairs or groups. Take the Coyote and Road Runner for example. Both characters are designed to look good on their own, but the color design wasreallymade with their relationship inmind. The colors of the Road Runner are in essence reminiscent of a sportscar. The cool blues and grays of the character “pop” against a warm,complementary desert backdrop. The coyote more or lesstakes on the coloring of the background; though hisvalue is darker, his charactercolor “recedes.” Though value helps balance things out, it isclear bytheircolors who the dominantcharacter is. This wasn’t an accident; this was design. To get a clearerview of Maurice’scharactercolor process, let’slook at one of hislast productions, Chuck Jones’s Timber Wolf web series. Jorge Gutierrezco–art directed the series at Chuck Jones FilmProductions with Maurice.He reflects on setting the color for themain character, Thomas T. Wolf: When we were setting the color for Timber Wolf, the story was supposed to take place in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I did a number of forest sketches with a warm green palette. Maurice looked at the work, and said, “You’re treating your backgrounds as if this is about making pretty drawings. You haven’t really thought about the characters that will live here. “Let’s start from the beginning: What is the story all about? Who’s the main character? What’s he like personality-wise? Where are we coming from with color? Let’s look at the main character: he’s basically a ‘blowhard.’ He stands around and talks a lot, and bad things happen to him. But he kind of deserves it. “Before anything else, we need to figure out the main character’s color first. Then the backgrounds.
“The backgrounds have to be designed around the character. That way we can make sure that the character will always ‘pop’ against the background. The black and white of the character’s eyes have to have the biggest point of contrast. The main character doesn’t wear gloves or anything like that, so it’s more than likely his body will only be one color. Let’s paint it gray mixed with a little bit of red. That will read well against the greens of the forest. Make the snout a different color to bring the audience’s eye into that area. For the nose, I want something really saturated. I think the nose should be pink; I doubt that we will be using much pink in the backgrounds. So with a pink nose, the audience will always see the character. The pink is also a little flamboyant, which is how this character sees himself.” I tried out a bunch of different pinks, and sure enough, Maurice chose a sort of What’s Opera, Doc? pink, kind of an Indian/Mexican pink. We showed it to the producers of the show, and they didn’t like the nose: too pink. As a compromise, we made the nose more of a desaturated red, though Maurice never thought it worked as well. After doing this work on the character, the backgrounds were much easier to approach. We used a cool palette for the settings, cool browns, cool greens, and the Timber Wolf character really popped.
A light test from What’s Opera, Doc? Even with all of Elmer’s fancy trappings, it’s clear that Bugs is the star of the picture. With the exception of his eyes, all of Elmer’s “whites” are at least two values darker than those of Bugs. Elmer recedes into the background, Bugs moves forward. Value, color, and staging all go to support this idea. Thomas T. Wolf in and out of his environment. ANALOGOUS AND SPLIT-COMPLEMENTARY CHARACTER COLORS Though Maurice didn’t originatemany of the charactercolor palettesthat he worked with, he adapted themto work in the cartoons he designed.He toldme, “Generally, themore colors a character has, the harder it isto design environmentsfor.” Keep inmind that at Warner Bros.—except in rare casessuch asWhat’s Opera, Doc?—once a charactercolor was set, it wouldn’tchange over the course of a film. Pepé Le Pew and Sylvester have strong black-and-white colorschemes, which ensure they will read on almost anymidrange value background setup. Wile E. Coyote, on the other hand, usesvalues and saturation of a single color. Most generally however, Maurice played cool/warmcontrasts, even if those contrasts were subtle,such as Bugs Bunny’smouth and ears against the gray of hisfur.
COMPLEMENTARY CHARACTER COLORS When Maurice wanted a character to reallystand out, he often took advantage of the way complementarycolors worked together by designing charactercolorsthat were complementaryto the background. Often he also used complementarycolorschemes within the colors of a character itself, but usually keeping themostsaturated elements near the character’s head. Again, Mauricemade use of both additive and subtractive color combinationsin hischaractercolor design,sometimesmixing andmatching whatever looked best to him. Let’slook at a few examples: Daffy’sred and green attire isridiculous, but the warm,saturated colormakes himstand out fromthe background. This earlysketch by Ralph Phillips uses a yellow-orange/turquoise additive complementaryscheme. Most of these colors are desaturated, leaving the saturated vermillion of the hair to pull the viewer’s eye in. Since red was a color that wasn’t as commonly used in backgrounds, Maurice often used it on characters as a tool tomake them read better. Maurice experimented with incarnations of WitchHazel in a red/green complementary
Maurice experimented with incarnations of WitchHazel in a red/green complementary scheme before she donned her familiar blue dress. Opposite, WitchHazel’s dressisso large that the area and intensity of thisredmakesit difficult to focus on her face—or anything else in the scene for thatmatter.
Robin Hood Daffy.
Ralph Phillips. Witch Hazel.
Warm/cool exploration for the Abominable Snowman. Maurice did a good deal ofcolor exploration on the Abominable Snow Rabbit(1961) and experimented with the idea of both warmand cool backgrounds. The finalcolormodel ended up being a cool white, with blue for the nose andmouth interior, which read great on the coolsnow, warmskies, and the final desertscene. Noble’scolormarkups were usually drawn or loosely painted on animation paper. These were then given to the head of the ink-and-paint department and transferred to cels. When a celsetup wasready, he would tryit on various background colors, perhaps even on a color sketch that he was developing at the same time. Adjustments weremade as needed and would be passed back and forth with ink-and-paint until Maurice was happy with how the character read.
Backgrounds were designed with this interplay of contrasts in mind.
TINTS adding white SHADES adding black TONES adding gray or color complement DESIGNING CHARACTER COLOR IN MODERN TIMES In themodern animation studios, a designer often won’t get the last word on character colors and values; themarketing teamwill. Thiscan be a veryfrustrating thing, and something that upset Maurice. When I wassetting charactercolor at Chuck Jones Film Productions, themarketing department at Warner Bros. handed down colormarkups of the charactersthat we were working with. These colors perhapslooked great asstuffed toys or T-shirts, but few of the colorsfollowed any of the principles discussed in thischapter. Obviouslythemarketing teamwon’t know anything about the storyin production. And they won’t knowmuchmore about the backgroundsthat the characters will need to play against. To be fair, I tried the colorsfrom Warner Bros.’marketing, and as expected, they didn’t
work. Maurice suggested we throw themout and start fresh, which we did. I onlymention this because ifyou spend anytime as a colorist in the industry, there is a good chance you willcome up against thissituation. It will be up to you,your director, and your producer to decide which wayto go. Like it or not, themarketing department is part of themachine we callmodern animation. Withmore education and communication, perhapsthere can be more back-and-forth between artistsin different departments, which will result in better design overall. SATURATION One of Maurice’s biggest pet peeves wasthe super-saturated, overblown color palettesin use in the 1990s. In a 2000 interview Maurice told Nancy Beiman, “Right now theythink brightcolor israw color. You see it in all the computerized stuff,very garish! They have no realcomprehension of what the color isfor the audience.” Thisstatement applied not only to the new releases at the time, but also includedmany of Maurice’s own filmsthat had been tampered with bythe studios. In the late 1990s Warner Bros. wasmastering new versions of the Looney Tunesshortsfor aDVDset they were putting out. They asked Maurice to consult on color.However, Maurice felt that the studio wasmore interested in using his name than his opinion. In the color timing sessions, in spite of Maurice’ssuggestions, the operator would push the saturation up, as Maurice put it, “to be asloud and obnoxious as possible.”He calledme in tearslamenting, “They are ruining the cartoons!” Ifyou ever get a chance to view an original Technicolor print,you willsee exactly what Maurice wastalking about. Certainly saturation plays amajor role in the design, butsaturation,much like value, is used in various amountsthroughout each composition, not as an overall design treatment. Maurice asked the color techniciansif they had seen the original prints: they hadn’t. DULL COLORS AGAINST BRIGHT Maurice controlled saturation by placing dullcolor against purercolor.He taught that “generally, the larger the area ofcolor, the lessits purity.”He explained that two colors of similarvalue and purity butted up against one another tend to compete and often cancel each other out.However, if the purity of one of the colorsis dulled, then the othercolor will actuallylook brighter andmore saturated. The example he gaveme was “a red flower should probably bemore saturated than the grassit is on. A sky will usuallysit behind the characters and other elementsin the composition.”However, thiscan also be reversed, depending on the needs of the story. Maurice advised art director Susan Goldberg on her
sequencesin Fantasia 2000 to use “dullcharacters on purer backgrounds,” a technique that Maurice also used inmany of his own films. Whichever wayyou go as a designer, themost important thing isthat like value,colorshould be stacked atvarying degrees of purity and brightness. Maurice wrote in his notes: A scale of intensity would run from pure color to gray. Five steps are enough for ordinary use: • full intensity • ¾ intensity • ½ intensity • ¼ intensity • neutrality or gray Intensity (or chroma) refers to a color’s strength, to the purity or brilliance as compared to a color less gray. Mixing a color with its complement or a neutral gray (white or black) will change its intensity by graying or dulling it. The best wayto learn to controlcolor and saturation isto put brush to paper, and actually paint. To Maurice it wasimportant for an artist to learn how to previsualize a color composition. Thisis difficultskill to acquire when sliding a control in a programgives quick results. Yes, itmaytake longer to get good results by hand at first. But any animation film designer who isserious about the craft will work on their traditional technique first and later apply what theylearn to the computer. PAINTING WITH SPIT While oversaturation is a common problemofcomputercolor, the opposite is often true of traditionalmedia. With no undo button on the brush,making bold, interesting color choicescan be a stressfulventure in the beginning. The end result is often weak, timid compositions with no realcolor focus. Maurice called this “painting with spit,” andmost all of ustraining with himwere guilty of it.He taught that when we paint, we should be bold in our approach. Noble BoyDonHall recountsthislesson with Maurice: One Sunday afternoon, Maurice and I went watercolor painting at Descanso Gardens. By this point in his life, Maurice was nearly blind and struggled to make pictures, but I think the idea of spending a warm spring day outdoors in a beautiful
place was far more important than whether the outing produced a good painting or not. Maurice set up next to an area that was blooming with flowers, and I set up about fifteen yards behind him. I decided that I would impress the master with a painting of him doing a painting. Why, I could just see it, matted and framed and on his wall. “My, what an exquisite painting,” guests would say, admiringly. “Yes, it is,” Maurice would say proudly, “taught him everything he knows.” So, I got to it. I blocked in a quick pencil sketch, and then started layering on delicate washes. I spent a great deal of time putting in the blue stripes on the back of Maurice’s chair with a tiny little brush. After about a half an hour or so, Maurice got up and walked toward me. “What’ve you got there?” he asked. I handed him my painting and waited for the inevitable praise that was going to be heaped upon me. “What are you doing,” he thundered, “painting with spit?” My face dropped. “Why, this won’t work at all. Let me sit down!” I watched as he grabbed a thick brush and swashed it around in the water, quickly mixed some colors, and threw down big, bold blocks of rich hues on my dainty, anemic, little sissy painting. In a few minutes, he was done. It now looked like a painting, instead of a tinted drawing. He didn’t need to say much more. He had made his point. He had a way of doing that. Be bold in your approach, have fun, but work hard, and never let “the Man” crush your spirit, i.e., don’t paint with spit— have sweaty fun—and every now and then, give ’em the One-Fingered Salute! I can’t imagine better words of wisdom to guide you through your life. Thanks, Coach. Exploratory color sketches for I Was a Teenage Thumb (1963). COLOR SKETCHES AND COLOR KEYS There were usuallytwo stepsin Maurice’scolor design processfor backgrounds and
There were usuallytwo stepsin Maurice’scolor design processfor backgrounds and environments:colorsketches and color keys. Originally Maurice had wanted to put these stepsin two separate chapters, with a chapter on background layout between.However, for comparison and claritysake and since there is a lot ofcrossover, I found it easier to combine thisinformation into one chapter. • A color sketch, or inspirationalsketch, is an exploratory painting usuallymade before the background layout process, which attemptsto capture themood and spirit of a story, without necessarilystaging anything. Thesemight often be a simple exploration of a painting approach for a rock orsome other element. Often colorsketches are based on thumbnails and working drawingsmade earlier in the process. Ofcourse each film developed differently;sometimes Maurice wouldmake colorsketch roughs based on Chuck’scharacter layouts. Manytimes a colorsketch would be good enough that Maurice would be able to use it as a key and put it back into the filmwith little or no adaptation. • A colorkey is a small painting that is usuallycreated after layout and istypicallyspecificto a scene, although asmentioned earlier, a good colorsketch can often be blown up and used asthe basisfor a drawn background layout. Color keys will be used bythe background painter asreference for the final background painting. Maurice explained hiscolorsketch process: Once the director agrees on a direction to take the picture, you can begin fleshing out some of your rough thumbnails designs in color. Start your color thumbnails the same way you started your pencil roughs: rough and small. This will allow you to go through a lot of color ideas quickly. Don’t worry about detail yet. The most important thing is to get the overall feeling. I would make rough design sketches with washes of cel-paint on pieces of animation paper. Then go over that with Prismacolor pencils. Once I found an approach, or a design I liked, then I would develop it into a larger color key. It’s important that you sketch in your medium. That is, to use the same materials that your final background art will be in. When I designed for Disney, I would sketch in watercolor because that was the medium that the final backgrounds would be in. At Warner Bros. I used cel-paint for the same reason. Sometimes I would make quick notes in color pencil or something else once I had set the color and style, but the final sketch was always in the medium of the final art. Many of Maurice’s earlycolorsketches weren’tstaging anything in particular; they were
Many of Maurice’s earlycolorsketches weren’tstaging anything in particular; they were often exploratoryideasthat took formgradually. Something assimple as a smallcolor rendering for a girder or a rock arch could lead to other ideas. Many of his earlycolor keys were nearlyidentical to the final frame. But the longer he and painter PhilDeGuard worked together, the less exacting Maurice had to be. A few shorthand notes would often be enough to put over an idea. Frequently Maurice would refer to a particularcolorsketch for an entire sequence of final drawn layouts without having to paint a fullcolor key. Thismethod was used onmany of the later Road Runner films, as Maurice explained to Milton Grayin a 1977 interview: Phil and I worked together on so many Road Runners. He was a very thorough guy and liked to know exactly where he was going at all times. So, we’d know the color scheme . . . one or two little color notes would cover the Road Runners. Then on some of these zany shapes in the layout . . . I’d use a colored pencil to indicate strata, to give him an idea of how this thing was broken down. Often Maurice would try a variety ofcolorcombinations until he found something that felt right. Sometimes he would hit on something right away, and other timesit took longer. He admitted that there were a few times when an idea hadn’t gelled completely and he “wanted to crawl under hisseat” when a cartoon screened. In a 1971interview with Joe Adamson, Maurice discussed this process:
Contrary to what he told us about always using the same materials that he used in his background art, in the 1960s Maurice often designed his color sketches in marker, working directly over the rough storyboard panels. The sketches were fairly tight, so they were easy to translate to the final backgrounds.
If there aren’t many changes in environment, a few color keys would often be enough to guide the background artist through an entire film. A final background.
Rough pencils and a color sketch from Chariots of Fur (1994). To copy his rough thumbnails, Maurice would often cover the back of his rough drawing with pencil graphite, then retrace the front of the image, making a light transfer to another piece of paper. Usually this new image would be cleaned up or painted in rough color. When I hear a story and I know I’m going to design on the thing, I mentally visualize certain approaches on it, which eventually become a reality on paper. With many designs, one can work with it and work with it, and nothing seems right. I might do four or five ideas, and I’m torn between all of them; I don’t know which is exactly right and I’m wasting time by trying to make up my mind, and so I just put them all away. I go over and do what I call a bookkeeping job: I know that there are a certain number of close-ups and so forth; they’re routine things that I’ve got to get done. I’ll get those out of the way so I’ll have time enough to concentrate on the knotty problem. And in the meantime, I keep thinking about it, adding drawings and sketches to the pile of ideas for this knotty problem. And then one morning I’ll come in and take all the stuff out, and I’ll say, “Well, that isn’t it, and that isn’t it—Oh! Here it is.” You see? It’s been there all the time. I’ve already worked through it, but I didn’t recognize it. Then when he felt he had something that worked, Maurice would present hiscolor ideas to Chuck Jones.He explained this processto Milton Grayin 1977: After so many years, we had a kind of rapport. Three or four key sketches and he’d know what my intentions were. They were usually 4’ × 5’ (102 × 127 mm), always in color . . . and then I would work with the background man. Stephen Fossatti, who was a producer/director at Chuck Jones FilmProductionsin the 1990s,shares his unique insight about Maurice and Chuck’srelationship and working method, while they were working on Chariotsof Fur:
One day Chuck was sitting at his animation desk doing his character layouts for the lightning sequence; I could hear him crumpling up paper and over time growing more vocal in his work. There was a definite frustration building and I was uncertain about checking in on him to see what was wrong. After a while it became silent again and suddenly there was a little burst of laughter and after a few more chuckles and about ten more minutes Chuck walked out of the room, handed me a stack of drawings and asked me to have Maurice come in the next day so he could go over the sequence with him. Chuck left and I went in to his office and found about a dozen beautiful coyote drawings crumpled up in the trash can. I compared the discarded drawings to the ones he had given me and was astonished to realize that Chuck, even with his own characters, had been struggling to find exactly the right pose and exactly the right expressions. The next day Maurice came in to the office and Chuck went over the sequence with him quickly and summarily. They seemed to know each other so well that Chuck’s few and somewhat gruff comments and Maurice’s fewer and somewhat prickly questions seemed to be completely understood by both of them. Chuck left; Maurice started working. Maurice came in to the studio for a few days straight and sketched and painted his thumbnail tests. To my surprise he seemed unsettled with his work until about the third or fourth day, when he finally lit up again and concluded that he was ready to show the tests to Chuck. To my astonishment, Maurice had done maybe a half a dozen or more color sketches of the same three layouts to get the color design exactly as he wanted it for the lightning sequence. Again I was amazed: here was one of the greatest designers ever and he, like Chuck, had struggled with something that to anyone else would have seemed as if it would be automatic for them. Obviously it could have been if either of them didn’t care about their art and/or wasn’t somehow trying to impress the other and perhaps even compete with one another. I understood then that great art, even for great artists, is never easy and that great collaborations were even harder.
Wild over You (1953) color sketches: if Maurice had a clear vision of a film, he would sometimes riff in color to kick things off before getting specific. This also gave him material to talk over with Chuck Jones. If an exploratory sketch looked promising, he would explore with pencil roughs. Here are some notes on the color development for a few of Maurice’sfilms: Wild Over You (1953) This was Maurice’sfirst Pepé Le Pew cartoon. As always, he would start with pencil thumbnails, then color thumbnails, then tightercolor roughsto be used as background reference. Keysformany of Maurice’sfilms werematted in black. This gave a cleaner look and allowedmore focus on the color. Maurice would say, “You are alwaystrying to sellyour design approach to someone; presentyour ideas well.”
After color sketch exploration, more exacting color keys are used as reference for specific backgrounds.
From A to Z-Z-Z-Z (1953) and Boyhood Daze (1957) The Ralph Phillipsseries of films have grown in popularity over the years and remained two of Maurice’sfavorites. Yet, asloved asthey are now, they weren’t as well received when theyfirst premiered. Tomanytheysimply didn’t look like Looney Tunes. Artistsin the industry accused Maurice of aping the influential UPA studio. In response, Maurice asked, “How else doesthe world look through a child’s eyes?” Maurice created dozens ofcolor sketchesfor both films, working back and forth with Chuck Jones on the layouts. Then Maurice gave very precise color keysto PhilDeGuard for each background. Elements of the “real” world that Ralph Phillipslived in found their wayinto his daydreams. For example, in Boyhood Daze Maurice uses a stuffed tiger,stylized household plants, and uncut grassfor the jungle. In FromA to Z-Z-Z-Z a fishbowl becomes an undersea world. Maurice worked very hard to keep the designschildlike using reallysimple shapes and color themes. Color sketches for A to Z-Z-Z-Z.
Though this specific shot of the schoolhouse was never used in A to Z-Z-Z-Z, the sketch was good enough for the background painter to use on other related shots.
Color keys for Boyhood Daze with rough pencil background layouts. Boyhood Daze and A to Z-Z-Z-Z were two of Maurice‘s favorite shorts from his time at Warner Bros.
Color keys for Boyhood Daze. Rough thumbnails from the same sequence exploring shape and mood.
Ralph Phillips jungle exploration.
Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953) In contrast, in films with a simple background setup such asthe Road Runnerseries or Duck! Rabbit, Duck! Maurice would only need to create one or two finished color keysto indicate what he wanted to see in the background paintings. A final Phil DeGuard background (top left) guided by Maurice’s color keys.
Desert color keys and sketches.
The Road Runner Series (Jones/Noble 1953–1994) Art director Mike Giaimo shares histhoughts: As director John Ford found his visual muse in Monument Valley, Maurice found his particular brand of cinema language through the Road Runner series, where his sense of staging and camera perspective came into full play. One senses in this series that not only is Maurice a master with camera direction and design, he’s having a heck of a good time as well. It is interesting to follow the evolution of Maurice’s style through the Road Runner cartoons, the first of which was released in 1949. In the earlier entries the desert landscapes are caricatured, but they pale by comparison to the more surreal and whimsical heights he would achieve with these environments by the mid-1950s. The visuals would evolve to reflect more and more the precarious relationship between the Coyote and Road Runner, with huge boulders that rest unsettlingly upon the top of pinpoint buttes, desert plant life that looks more like spiky specimens from another planet, and strange cloud formations that anticipate and punctuate the Coyote’s eventual demise. Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953) In a 1971interview with Joe Adamson, Maurice said: “the idea ofspace becamemore and more developed. I’d do a sketch and prettysoon we had floating cities, and jet-propelled taxicabs, and all this. Space evolved. Farmore than we ever anticipated originally.”
A final Phil DeGuard background. A Maurice color key, compared to the pencil layout. Hare-Way to the Stars (1958) Animator/director Eric Goldberg writes:
Maurice always contended that Chuck created a positive atmosphere in which he could create freely—not a small thing for an animation director who knew his own talents were formidable—and that he trusted Maurice implicitly. When they embarked on Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century, Maurice took it upon himself to create props and settings—notably the Orwellian eyeball that scrutinizes Daffy as he enters Dr. Hi I.Q.’s chambers—that were his unique perspective on outer space. Chuck saw the stuff and let Maurice go to town; Maurice thus created his own “antigravity-platforms-that-hung-in-midair” space environment, which he later expanded upon in Hare-Way to the Stars and has since been imitated countless times, notably in The Jetsons. The further props he created then became elements of the story—the rising disc elevator, the “evaporators” that could transport you to a new location—at least a good decade before Star Trek, I might add. Light tests to see how the designs would look under camera.
A final Phil DeGuard background. Bewitched Bunny (1954) In thissatirical take on children’sfairytales and children’s book illustration, Maurice’s style choice was ultimatelyinspired bythe character of WitchHazel herself. Maurice told Harry McCracken in a 1991interview, “The zany quality of WitchHazel immediately suggested a zany approach:cupboards painted on the floor and up the wall, and so forth. She was amarvelouscharacter and certainly wouldn’t be in a normalsetup.”
A final Phil DeGuard background. Maurice color keys. Claws for Alarm (1954) Maurice liked the challenge of a staging a black cat(Sylvester)in a dark,scary house.
Maurice liked the challenge of a staging a black cat(Sylvester)in a dark,scary house. Drawn fromhisyouth in Redlands, California, Victorian themes were a favorite of Maurice’s, and they often popped up in his work. Maurice would usually try out several color combinations before deciding which worked best for the film.
Deduce, You Say (1956) Noble worked hard to capture the unique world of the “Shropshire Slasher” with concentrated pools of light and shadow. Maurice often painted hiscolor keystoo light in order to compensate for five levels ofcelsthat would darken the background art in the final filmframe. Color keys and color sketches inspired by the Tam O’Shanter restaurant near Los Angeles.
Color sketches for What’s Opera, Doc? What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) Mauricemade dozens ofcolorsketchesforWhat’s Opera, Doc? Now considered a tour de force in animation design, it wasn’t widely accepted at first by his peers. I asked himabout the filmand the creative design chances he took.He toldme: I thought it would work, in my head it worked, but you never really know until you get it up on the screen. . . . Sometimes when you experiment you will fail. Some way-out ideas may not work the way you thought they would. But that’s okay! That’s the nature of being on the edge of exciting design. You will never do anything interesting if you don’t take chances. Maurice toldHarry McCracken in 1991: As it went along, I was aware that something was kind of happening. I put in a lot of innovative ideas, and I would get calls from the ink-and-painting department saying, “Now, you don’t mean to say you’re going to paint this character all red?” or something like that. I’d say, “Yes, that’s the way we want it.” And Chuck was backing me up on it. As we sketched and designed and put this thing together, when we finally got it, it was just one of those things that came off. It could have been a pudding. This is one of those strange things about doing something creative: you
take a big chance, and I suppose I could have been put out the front door if it had fallen on its face. But Chuck backed me up on it, and we have What’s Opera, Doc? today. I still get a boot out of just watching it. Mike Giaimo added: Maurice’s ethos at Warner Bros. hit a high-water mark in 1957 with What’s Opera, Doc? Here his skills in layout, design, and color came to its fullest fruition. Visual invention seems to burst from every frame. With grand, cinematic scale, expressionistic fauvist-like color, and decorative detailing, this is truly Maurice’s magnum opus. What’s truly surprising in What’s Opera, Doc? is how we are transported to a realm far beyond the common Looney Tunes world. Visually What’s Opera, Doc? seems to bridge the gap between fine and commercial art. It is a masterful piece of work with Maurice firing on all cylinders. Indeed, looking at Maurice’s output during his Warner Bros. years, one could say that if it weren’t for his sly graphic wit, there would never have been a distinctive standout style at Warner Bros. Without his touch, the Looney Tunes are polished and serviceable but visually unremarkable.
Maurice’s color key (left) and Phil DeGuard’s final background. Shadows and effects would be added later in camera.
A progression of early color sketches, a more polished piece, and the final background setup. More color exploration from What’s Opera, Doc?
A test slate for Drafty, Isn‘t it?
Light tests. Maurice would mark through a film strip if he wasn’t happy with it. He would then readjust camera, and/or the art and reshoot.
LIGHTING TESTS Before completely handing everything over to the background painter, Maurice would shoot a series of lightingtests(also called wedge tests)just tomake sure that everything would look the wayit wassupposed to on film. These lighting tests would include a simple cel setup with a few select backgrounds orcolor keys. CartoonslikeWhat’s Opera, Doc? have extensive light testsmade for nearly everyshot, while a Road Runner picturemay have only had a few keytests because the colors and values wouldn’tchange remarkablythroughout a film. Typically backgrounds were shot with up to five levels ofcels on top of them. Even scenes with no characterscould carryfive cel layersto keep color and contrastconsistent. Each cel layer would darken a background a certain percentage. Thus, Maurice would intentionally design his keys and backgroundsmore brightly and with slightlylesscontrast than he knew would appear on film. Testing underwater effects using a ripple glass. At the same time, hemade adjustmentsforcolor and saturation, because theytoo shift on film. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a good example of a planned colorshift. The cel color of The Grinch was designed in a very bright, lime-green hue, anticipating that it would turn an unappealing “baby puke” yellow-green on-screen. Some of the newerDVDs and Blu-ray discstryto “correct” this “problem” byreferencing the lime-green of the actual
celcolors. This would seemlike the logical thing to do. The real problemisthat theDVD colorists are working without the understanding that Maurice anticipated—and wanted— the colorshift.He did extensive testing undercamera to get the filmsto look just the way he wanted. Though color and value shifts aren’t asmuch of a problemnow asthey were in Maurice’s day, he thought it wasimportant to include in thistext, in order to help better preserve his and others’classic work. Tests were also important when looking at different lighting and physical effects,such as ripple-glass “underwater” scenes or the softvignettes of High Note(1960). If Maurice didn’t like what he saw in a test, he wouldmark a line through it with a grease pencil,make adjustmentsin the artwork orcamera settings, then reshoot until he got it right.
STEP 07: Layout A finished background from Boyhood Daze.
A Chuck Jones character layout for High Note (1960) on left with the background layout in the center. On the right, the two are combined to form a guide for the animation and background departments. In traditional drawn animation there are two types of layout, character and background: • Character layout: the rough key poses and expressions of the characters, which help guide the animation • Background layout: the pencil drawings of the background that will be used to guide the background painter. At Warner Bros., Chuck Jones would draw hischaracter layouts based roughly on the storyboards.He often indicated rough ground-planes and background elements as reference. Then Chuck would time out the poses on an exposure sheet. Often these character layouts would also be shot undercamera, to test and refine the timing. In addition to guiding the animators, thistiming information would be used bythe composer to help in scoring the film. It would also be used by Maurice when planning hislayouts. Of course timing is an important part of planning pans and othercameramoves. But Maurice also prioritized shots of the filmaccording to theirscreen time. For example, he wouldn’t spend asmuch time designing a shortshot as he perhaps would an establishing shot. Often shorterscenes were designed with slightlymore exaggerated shapes,so they would read quickly. Once Maurice and Chuck had reviewed the character layoutstogether, Maurice would make his own copy of the character layoutsin red pencil. Using copies of Chuck’slayout sketches, he would design the background layouts around these poses. Maurice explained tome: Using my rough design ideas and color sketches, I would take Chuck’s rough character poses and build a world around them. If I had ideas for better staging, or a visual gag . . . we would talk it over, and sometimes the ideas would make it in,
sometimes they wouldn’t. But it was always part of the process. Chuck Jones would often provide rough background information in the character layout folder. Here is a Jones background indication sketch on the left from Duck, Rabbit, Duck, which Maurice used as the basis for the rough background layout. More often than not, Chuck would simply provide a ground plane that Maurice would then expand on, as shown in this shot that was cut from Boyhood Daze. Maurice felt having a clear idea of the staging always helped the animators, and he tried to include at least a rough background layout in theirscene folders. Ofcourse, the final background layoutmight differslightlyfromthe rough layout. But the staging and path of action would remain the same. Typically Maurice would first design the stillshots of a film, getting the stills out to the animators quickly beforemoving on to pans andmore technical types ofscenes. In 1977 he explained to Milton Gray how he worked with Chuck and the animators:
I would work from Chuck’s roughs. He would do the character layouts, I would take the exposure sheet; I knew how much footage we had, and I knew the continuity. Usually, I would figure all the speeds of all the pans, so that by the time the animator got it, he got a rough layout with all the stops and starts and everything. . . . The animators would be given sections; I’d give Abe [Levitow] or Benny [Washam] or Ken Harris the number of scenes I could let them have right then, then I’d have to plot the pans and so forth, and give them a rough distance they were going to travel. And if they had to register to something, try to give them a registry, either in a stop or in a start position. It became kind of ticklish if they had three of four registrations on a pan, and I’m working blind. So I would quickly make up a shape, and then I had to make that thing work. That meant I had to have a pretty good idea of where I was going to go with something. Maurice’s rough layout; Chuck requests that the top of the tower be shortened; the final artwork with a shorter tower.