“Queen Poppy sets off to Bergentown to save her friends, confident she’ll make it back alive…”

These are the Scrapbook version of the Trolls snack pack and some character expressions. It was a challenge to find how much detail we could loose to keep our characters recognizable. 

This is part of the Trolls opening sequence. Concept art and fabrication by Me, AFX animation by Erik Tillmans and storyboards by Joel Crawford. Each asset was hand built with felt, paper and embroidery.

 My process started with presenting an animated gif to directors, Mike Mitchell and Walt Dorhn. Painting and working with the animation tool in Photoshop allowed me to design fluidly. I evaluated the story boards to plan out camera movement and work out character action. I knew the camera needed to push in through the dead Troll atop the cage, so I designed the town path to compliment this movement. Next, I focused on the buildings and set dressing. Bubbly poo shapes felt appropriate for Bergentown, while my colors needed variation within the muted palette. The real challenge of this piece was to find the exact materials that reflected the tonal range in grays and browns. I reserved my blacks for the cage and full saturation for the Troll Tree as it represents happiness. The result was three separate backgrounds, six hero buildings that could be flipped and duplicated in interesting ways, three Troll Trees, cages, and various set dressing assets. Each asset was photographed separately, edited and composited. For each scrapbook peice, I would deliver a psd packet to Erik to animate.

The full hand built set of the Bergentown transition.

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