Page 5 was posted on 09/04/2006.

There was a movie in the late 90’s called ‘Titan A.E.’ It was an animated film that received a lukewarm response from audiences. Part of this may have been a result of the overall look of the film. It was classically animated, but it came out at a time when 3D animation in films was becoming very hot thanks to the work at Pixar. Perhaps this shift is why the makers of Titan A.E. included many 3D rendered elements within the movie. Many of the environments and backgrounds were rendered three dimensionally while the characters were animated using the traditional 2D methods. I remember one reviewer commenting on the effect that this created. He thought the characters looked stranded in this 3D world and the contrast of styles prevented him from suspending his disbelief and enjoying the movie.

This problem is one that I’ve become concerned about in the last two weeks  as the characters in NODE are starting to venture out into new environments (albeit in flashback) outside of the Doctor’s office. I mentioned in the notes for page 4 that I was concerned about the juxtaposition of art styles between the foreground characters and the richer backgrounds that I’m starting to introduce. This issue became even more important on page 5 since there are several different richly rendered backgrounds here.

I am pleased with the overall appearance of page five, although I still think that some changes will have to be made to the art style of ether the foreground characters or the backgrounds or both to help these elements live together better. At the end of production of page five, I made a slight tweak that helped things a bit. On panels 3-5 (in the corn field) I made the character inks slightly transparent. This had the effect of blending them better into the environment that they had previously appeared to float above.

Everything on this page was drawn in Photoshop. The crops were drawn as shown by the pull-out selection below. I basically drew a selection of leaves and stalks, assembled them into two different varieties of plants, pasted them into the scene, distorted, reversed and scaled several of the plants to create variety, and them blurred some of them to help create depth.