De Tand Des Tijds

ROLE

Managing Art Director, Concept Artist

DESCRIPTION

De Tand Des Tijds (2019) is a feature length 2D animation made for Dutch television by Ka-Ching Animation in Rotterdam.

It's a story about a boy trying to rescue his history teacher father in a time travel frenzy all set in a visually quite unique style developed by the project's principal production designer Jelle Gijsberts.

I was hired as managing art director to work with Jelle and the directors to put the style into a practical set of visual rules and manage a team of layout- and background artists during production.

PROJECT DURATION

2017-2018 ( production) 2019 release on Dutch tv

CREDITS

Producer Ka-Ching Animation, Directors Erik Verkerk & Joost van der Bosch

FORM

2D animated feature-length film for television

LINK TO FILM

You can watch the whole film on NPO.nl here.

(Only from the Netherlands though)

Shape language

The main challenge on this project was to get into the head of the principal designer and make an expansive style guide and start to design sets myself for the production using these very set of rules.

Shape language

To make it crystal clear to all designers that were to work on the project I made pages like this explaining the fundamentals of the visual style.

Style application

One of the visuals I made explaining how far to stray from 'realistic depiction' to the designers.

Set concept

Here I made a sketch applying the style rules over the early concept (the yellow border picture)

Final design

Here is the final artwork made by Jelle based on the sketch.

Tying places together

Quite a lot of time I spend being the link between the boards and the final designs made by Jelle and the background team. Here are some examples.

Making a map

A really fun thing is always to make a map of the world your designing. Here you see version 1 with the time dial circle the director suggested drawn on top.

Museum layout

I making a rough design for the town as well as how the museum will work interior by imagining the different floors.

Final design

The final art of the town Nimmerveer meticulously made by Jelle Gijsberts

From board to final shot

Another example of what my role with usual shots is - drawing the in-between of the storyboard and the layout - and then supervising the process.

Colour design

I was also responsible for the colour palette of the film - with 18 locations, some in the present day, some in the past, some in the fantasy of the protagonist, a good colour strategy was pretty important for the film to read well.

Overall colour strategy

The different worlds of the film held next to each other to define their identity.

Colour and light plan

Example of how put my colour and light plan over the various shots from the board.

Painting the past

In contrast to the fantasy world, in the past - I channeled 17th century Dutch painters and looked at lots of photo references to make alleyways feel authentic.

Going to dusk for the climax

Really pushing warm colours in the heat of the action helped set it apart. You can also see here how I transfer loosely drawn board backdrops into layout plans.

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