Character Design
The coolest looking characters are only cool if the animators can animate them. The first film had a set look that we had to follow, but we still had a bunch of new characters to design. We tried to make these new designs simple with a definite style. We wanted to add a fresh dynamic look that would blend nicely with what had been done before, as well as inspire the animators. All animators seem to love meaty, fun characters to animate.

Color Design
Try to limit the number of colors in your palette. We worked from Wang's color palette to avoid having them mix special colors for our film.

Character and Model Design Pack
Basically every character, every object, everything that moves needs to be designed and drawn from all angles. The animators need to know exactly what characters and objects look like in order to animate confidently. There is tremendous pressure put on the animators. Not only are they expected to animate in the neighborhood of 50 feet per week, they only get paid per foot of finished animation and not having enough information can really slow them down. We supplied every expression, every mouth position used for every character in the film. This was to keep the animators from inventing their own interpretations. We supplied completely detailed x-sheets (exposure sheets) with all timing, lip sync, behavior and actions clearly marked.

We also built our main characters and vehicles with CG. We animated 200 scenes of the characters flying and vehicles moving in order to help lighten Wang's burden. We believed that by solving the flying mechanics and vehicular movement for them, it would give them more time to concentrate on the acting scenes. The scenes animated in CG were then printed out on registered animation paper and shipped to Wang for clean-up and detailing. The CG animation still needed facial features, hair and clothes added. They were then inked and painted, the same as the rest of the scenes.

Other ElementsThere are numerous other elements to a solid pre-production process, not the least of which are backgrounds, layouts and exposure sheets. Without going into each one of them, we can say this: our crew worked hard and had to jump around a lot to cover all the bases. We had a small team and very few department managers.

Dave Marshall.	Phil Robinson.

As directors, we covered a lot of territory, more than for a normal production. We were the quality control. We tweaked storyboards and corrected poor layouts. We were involved in CG reference, location design, color design, x-sheet and (exposure sheet) timing. Phil spent three months in Taiwan approving pencil tests, reviewing layouts and checking color, and he even did one of the voices. We worked closely with the songwriters, musicians, actors, composers and sound designers as well.

The production managers stayed late many nights to ensure that shipments overseas were made on time. However, we never shipped until the work was completed to satisfaction. That was our golden rule.

Ultimately, we worked bloody hard and that's the most important step. Dave Marshall and Phil Robinson co-directed FernGully 2: The Magical Rescue for Fox at Wild Brain in San Francisco