Arbor Square:
An Original Animated Pilot
Between 2020 and 2022, I (with the help of my friend and co-writer Stevie Maxwell) developed and created a twelve-minute pilot for an animated series called Arbor Square. All on-screen elements were created by me, including storyboards, environments, layout, character models, rigs, animation, lighting, compositing, and editing. I used Blender’s Grease Pencil toolkit to create two-dimensional rigs for the characters that exist within the 3D space of the environments. The storyboards were also created in 3D space using Grease Pencil, allowing for a combination storyboarding/layout process that saved months of production time. Environment models, as well as the comic-style NPR shaders within them, were all developed with the intention of matching the cartoonish designs of the characters. The pilot episode follows roommates Quinn and Jonathan as they navigate a job search and risk it all to land employment at the local Arbor Square Cafe. Cassian, the eccentric owner of the cafe, is locked in a bitter love/hate rivalry with Jessica, the manager of the corporate coffee chain across the street. The full pilot episode, as well as the trailer and associated behind-the-scenes video vlogs, are available to watch on my YouTube channel.
Layout & Animatic
Production Breakdown
I knew from the beginning that I’d be the sole artist developing this project beyond the writing stage, so much of my thinking around scope involved streamlining any processes I could. This experimentation led to the development of a rudimentary layout/storyboarding process that I affectionately dubbed “board-out”. By creating the rough poses and blocking using 2D tools that could be staged and manipulated within the camera in 3D space, I could avoid repeating the process of animating camera movement. It also gave me the opportunity to think through lighting and production design far in advance.
Environments
The environments of Arbor Square were built with efficiency and flexibility in mind. Each of the major sets contains merged interior/exterior models, which allowed for the through-the-window shots in the cafe in the first and last scenes of the pilot. To retain congruence with the characters, each of the sets has a baked line-art layer which also utilizes Grease Pencil. Stroke placement is determined by the camera location and baked after camera lock.
Rigging
Initially I had planned to create character rigs using a separate software package (likely either Toon Boom Harmony or Moho) and composite the 2D characters into 3D environments built in Blender. But with the then-recent development of Blender’s Grease Pencil tools, I decided it would save time in post-production to at least attempt to create the rigs and environments in the same DCC. What followed was a months-long period of planning and experimentation. Below is my initial scope planning sketch for the template rig, as well as a brief test of Jessica’s rig functionality.
Materials/Shaders
The materials in Arbor Square were made with the purpose of seamlessly integrating the 2D characters into the 3D world they occupy. This was accomplished with stepped NPR toon shaders built procedurally in Blender. Further into production, I began to regret the initial lack of texture in these shaders, and created variations with grit, hatching, and halftone dots, which were added to each scene retroactively with a homemade Python script.
