Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Pool, Umbrella, Swirlywind

Pool

Mr. King's Pool was a fun little episode about taking advantage of a friends generosity. It's a very hot day, which Mr. King does not like, and he's inspired by the fish who are always nice and cool in Peaceful Pond. He asks to borrow a little of their pond water so that he can have a pool of his own but ends up taking a lot. (Even though he meant well by wanting to make a bigger pool of his own for his other friends.) I think the best part of this episode comes from the characters reactions to Mr. King having a pool. Their comic reactions are more typical of adult humor, stopping midway complaining about the heat to exclaim, "Why, Mister King...You have a pool." But I think the younger audience will get the very quick change in emotion. For some reason Rolo reminds me of Jon Lovitz in this ep.


Umbrella

I was really looking forward to doing an episode with rain and may be one of the few people who actually prefer it to sunny days. (Scottish heritage partially to blame.) One of the earlier notes on the outline of this script was regarding playing Mr. King as being bored. Bored being perceived as a negative emotion. In the end we treated Mr. King's initial bored reaction quickly and comically because I felt it was a primal feeling that all kids experience but tried to then shift focus away from him actually stating he was bored to him trying to find ways to keep the day fun. Add to that the short episode length and I think we arrived at a nice gentle balance. I believe this was also the first episode to show the exterior of Kaleidoscope Woods (design). Originally the design was to include a bit of Jim's house, Harriet's tree, Skit and Skoot's tree, but I wanted it to be more generic. Almost a symbol of the forest. This greatly simplified things and helped us avoid any future orientation issues. (As in I thought Jim's house was to the right of Mr. King's house etc.)





Swirlywind

Swirlywind completes our seasonal themed episode with our first look at winter.. Don provided beautiful colour keys for this one. The challenge being that Mr. King's world has a lot of white space in it so how were we to show snow? The most obvious thing to do was essentially to flip the world. White snow on the bottom with blue tinted skies. The next challenge was how to make the swirlywind stand out on the white snowy ground. By adding a subtle blue gradation to the ground. It all may sound obvious to all the art directors out there but I think Don brought a special extra to the overall look. Everything fit together so nicely that it was if it had existed for years. The final challenge was to ensure that the characters swept up in the swirlywind were never in peril. I handled this by what became a standard strategy when dealing with such things. A quick, comical little yelp followed by showing everyone is okay and not overly concerned with their peril. All that being said, I think now that winter is upon us a swirlywind fan might be readily welcomed by most.