Location, location, location: Worlds Away Prods. got a chance to bid on Hopeless Pictures because its offices were across the hall from the producers. Kim Lee (right) is the creative director and digital fx supervisor at Worlds Away. All Hopeless Pictures images © IFC/Trigger Street Independent.

Kim Lee is the creative director and digital fx supervisor at Worlds Away in Manhattan, where a 22-person team creates IFC’s animated series, Hopeless Pictures. Ten animators working in Autodesk 3ds Max crank out one 15-minute episode each week. The pilot episode debuted Aug. 19. The first of eight episodes created at Worlds Away debuted Aug. 26. Renowned character actor Bob Balaban directs the series.

Barbara Robertson: How did you become involved in the Hopeless Pictures project?

Kim Lee: The producers, Trigger Street Independent, who have an office across the hall from us, were in the process of putting a pilot together in Flash. When they asked if we’d become a liaison between the director and the Flash animation studio, we suggested putting a team together to create storyboards and animatics. While we were putting bids together for that, they asked us to bid everything. We said that if we did it, we wouldn’t want to work in Flash — that we could get the same look using the original artwork, but we wanted the flexibility of having the 3D camera. They went for it. The director was very interested in having the flexibility to do slight moves, to have a rack focus. And the producers liked that we wouldn’t have to redraw every pose.

We aren’t a Flash shop. We knew Max would give us so much more flexibility. If we were creating one-off characters 3D wouldn’t make sense because building them takes too much time, but for series work it becomes cost effective.

BR: Did that mean the look of the series changed?

View a 45-sec clip of The Making of… Hopeless Pictures (no audio) and see how Worlds Away builds the characters and sets in semi-3D.

KL: No. In this production, there are no 3D models like you traditionally think of 3D models. We’re making flat two-dimensional puppets that live in 3D; a bunch of flat planes like pieces of cardboard that are all linked together and texture mapped.

The original character was designed by Brian Smith. We were given all his artwork and the artwork generated in Flash for the pilot, and we were able to repurpose it.

We wanted to maintain the style of the original artwork. That meant we couldn’t do flat-shaded characters like South Park. And, we couldn’t see it being feasible to write a shader that reproduces paint strokes. So, we’re just making the original artwork move. Now, our artists know [Smith’s] style so well they can create characters.

BR: Was it difficult for animators to make the transition from 3D to this style of animating?

KL: If you can animate, we can teach you how to do this in a day.

BR: OK, so how does it work?

KL: If you were to look at the characters you’d see flat, two-dimensional puppets that live in 3D. We have eight versions of each main character: front, three-quarters front right, right side and so forth, all the way around; eight separate models from different perspectives on flat planes. The planes are transparent where you don’t have artwork.