Knockout! A Cuphead panel

eleanorose123:

heeey guess who came back from a super cool event featuring the lovely staff that were in Toronto (Tina Nawrocki who was one of the 5 animators, and also did concept work, Ali Morbi who did the 3D models for Grim and Djimmi’s fights, and even though she wasn’t there in person, we got some stuff from the background painter Caitlynn Russel too)! they were absolutely inspiring and i learned a lot from it (only 350 people got in it was very packed) but i thought i’d share some note worthy points! even though someone might post a video in the near future anyway lol

• Grim’s early design had him with a red color palette. I can assume it went green to better work with the light blue skies
• Djimmi’s background actually features a fully functional maze! and has real sand glued on for the dunes!
• Grim’s castle tower was made out of insulation foam. very squeaky.
• Both the tutorial piece of paper and the plane tutorial blueprints were from Dollarama. Ali actually suggested the plane tutorial’s opening animation and did it in his backyard using barbecue tongs to open up the paper and photoshopped it after.
• Tina animated all the Casino bosses but her least favorite was Mr Chimes. it reached a point where her only highlight to him was his knockout animation for the sheer relief of FREEDOM
• The reason there was so many female characters sprinkled around the game was cause specifically females in the 1930s animations were used only for love interests and the crew went “naw we’re not doing that” and decided to add them whenever possible
• All the animation was done on 1s, meaning for every second of animation it took 24 drawings. Tina was the fastest animator of the 5 and got through around 200 drawings a week, to which an audience member who works for Disney commented that she worked harder than a typical Disney production member.
• speaking of a lot of drawings, EXTREME shout out to Marija Moldenhauer who single-handedly inked ALL the frames of animation. holy hell i died when i heard that, MAD PROPS
• There’s a boat in Perilous Piers called “The Lillian” in reference to Lillian Friedman Astor, the first female studio animator in history, who worked mainly on Betty Boop but was sadly uncredited for the majority of her work. (we still remember you Lillian!)
• Every character she created Tina named and gave backstories to in her own head. While she wasn’t at liberty to say much, cause she wasn’t the official crew member to go to for “canon facts”, she did mention that she named the waffle from Baroness von Bon Bon’s fight, “Sir Wafflington the Third”.
• In addition, Pip and Dot are a couple and Dot “wears the pants in the relationship”.
• The entire staff had a designated meme folder during the production. Since everyone worked from home they all communicated through a production board site and Chad and Jared were very good at making gifs apparently.

might try to post pics in the future!