The Tom and Jerry Show
After Season 1 of The Tom and Jerry Show—the newest entry in the classic franchise, the teams at Warner Bros. and Renegade were dissatisfied with the look of the show. The show suffered from a low-budget feel, and characters were consistently off-model. Executives at WB felt that the brand wasn’t being represented properly.
During the Season 2 revamp of the show, I was brought onto the team at Renegade to assist with rebuilding the production process. Eventually, I moved into a supervisor role that involved character design and prop management, while managing in-house and freelance artists.
The goal was to update the look to be classic, but modern, while keeping the production pipeline Flash-based.
Cleanup & Rigging
Initially, I was brought onboard to handle the technical side of production: cleanup work and character rigging.
At the time, art files were messy, and there was no rigid production pipeline in place. These were all things that I helped remedy over time.
Cleanup: I would take a storyboard artist’s board and make sure everything was on-model. Lines had to be clean with the right weight, and colors had to be correct—down to the lighting of that particular scene. This was a process I would scale up for our art team.
Top: Daytime Rig Bottom: Nighttime Rig
A prop design template I created to ensure the proper sizing of a prop relative to character heights, as well as color and line weight.
Character Design
After streamlining the technical process, the director and executives entrusted me with the brand vision, allowing me to transition into character and concept design. Here are some of my favorite concepts from this time.
