Harald: November 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Enchanted- A Look Back

Oct. 2005
Since "Enchanted" was done on a life-action-budget, we didn't have as much time for visdev as we normally have for an animated feature. It all had to be done in some kind of a hurry, I worked on this for maybe two or three weeks altogether.There wasn't even time to clean things up, I submitted mainly sketches and ideas. I had been working on another project right before "Enchanted", which wasn't much fun and so working with Kevin Lima again, who had remembered me from Tarzan and who approached me very early in he project , was a great relief and much fun. Kevin wanted to have some Visdev on his hands , so that James Baxter could actually start animating as soon as possible, without loosing much time on nailing the style of the movie or start with first ideas.

Since the 2nd act takes place in NY and we were goig to have many verticals, we agreed to keep the 1rst part, the animated prolog, very round and floral, we wanted to avoid straight lines as much as possible. "Finally a director, who knows what he's doing and talking about", I thought, which might tell you, what kind of project I was just coming from.
The work of Alphonse Mucha came to my mind almost immedeatly, I pitched this idea and Kevin and I googled through his stuff together, picking the ones we liked and thought would work for Giselle's character. So I spent the first days doing roughs based on this idea, trying to find not so much the typicall Disney-princess, but more a kind of a nymph, that came across as a princess. Maxfield Parrish also was a great influence on the style of the movie.

From Harald's Diary: Tusday18th Oct.05 "My friday-meeting with Kevin was cancelled and I hardly remember the stuff I sent. Kevin is thrilled anyway. "You're leaving quite an enormous impact on this film and you're not even here." Apparently James Baxter likes my sketches and has taken some to his studio for a test. He also has been thinking about Mucha so I guess it's just meant to be."

Above are two stills from fairytale-programs made in the 70's in tchecheslovacia and which could be seen many times on TV when I was kid.Mostly around christmas.I was trying to come up with something along those lines, cause I loved the stuff.