Environment sketch for an unused scene by Scott Garner
Unlike the rest of the animation, this scene took place outside.
Sidewalk, cobblestone, and then a modern paved road?

Scott’s sketch for the “Shakespeare Showdown” sign hanging in the trophy room.
The notes are for “gun-metal grey” and “light gun-metal grey”.
Note the reflection squiggles that are also seen in the final illustration.

Maré & Scott’s notes for the sound effects we needed to find or make. Some we recorded in-house and some were snagged from freesound, a wonderful site for foley artists, DJs, or people just looking to waste a bunch of time listening to crazy noises (like I did). And everything is under the creative commons license.

Scott’s sketch for that same unused scene. The character here is outside of the theater, waiting impatiently for a horse/taxi. And hey and you can see the Süperfad logo on the stationery.

Maré Odomo’s sketches for the Old Timey Clicker Voter Thing and some hands. It kind of looks like a wiimote here, but the final version has woodgrain and blacklettering.

Scott used a fancy program called celtx and made it look awesome. celtx can be used for script-writing, storyboarding, and even comics. Oh, and it’s FREE.

Notes for lip-synching on that Süperfad stationery again. The one on the right is Blake’s.

Paul Barkshire’s sketches for the sobbing Juliet.

Hmm.

This is when we threw in the towel for the first set of front row characters. As you can see, I didn’t finish drawing the hair or the hats. And his body was too bulky anyway. I call this guy Waluigi because he looks like a jerk.

Unused audience member by Maré Odomo.

One of the challenges Team Shakespeare faced was to draw in the style of the lead character designer, Paul Barkshire. Because this character looks so different from the original characters, we were forced to scrap it and draw a new audience member. The outfit was essentially  re-used, so it wasn’t too much additional work.

Quick witch sketches by Jin Kong. Scott wanted them to look like the ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings. The final character design is more ambiguous, which meant we didn’t have to record an actual girl for the audio.

I call this guy Dan because he reminds me of a guy I know. Named Dan.

Dan also looks too different from Paul’s character, so we had to throw him away. Dan is part of a series of 3 characters that are meant to be in the front seats. On stage, Romeo and Hamlet are having a soliloquy-off and the audience is watching the back-and-forth-exchange. Their heads are separate and drawn as left, middle, and right so that they can swing their heads from side to side to watch. But the animation was clunky so we changed it so that just their eyes moved.

Digital sketches for the scroll animation. Scott and Maré were trying to figure out how to make it look realistic without hand-drawing everything. Scott said something about mask reveals? Some scrolls have handles. Some don’t. We kept going back and forth. Should the text be part of the scroll? Or should it appear from the sides like a news ticker? These are important decisions, you guys.