Hero Heights

Greetings from all of us in Hero Heights!

Thanks to the Holidays Bill and I have a few days off. So I’m taking advantage of this down time and catching up on some blogging.

The first piece of artwork you see is our design for the Frederator postcard. The Grand Poobah himself, Fred Seibert does this really neat thing with each creator of a show. He requests a piece of artwork and makes some sweet postcards to promote each show. So Bill had the great idea to do a Hero Heights parody of a comic book cover! So he sketched it out in pencil, I inked it and he colored it. I think it’s one of Bill’s best pieces, ever.

The next two pieces of artwork are “The Official Rough 5 point Turnarounds to the Hero Heights Universe for Smart Alec and Strikeout.” These were created for the overseas studio so that they’ll be able to draw our characters correctly from any angle. Bill did a sweet job of taking my direction and drawing these wonderful turnarounds.

The last image is a page from our storyboard after being slugged. No, I didn’t punch the drawing. Slugged is an animation term. To “Slug” a storyboard is to go through and indicate how long each drawing is to be held on the screen in relation to the dialogue track. I took a stopwatch and acted out the cartoon in my studio. I noted the time needed for each action. Then I took a script that had all of the line lengths noted, the storyboard, and dialogue track. I sat down and crunched the action numbers with the dialogue numbers and made careful notes on the storyboard as I went through it. In just a few hours I had slugged the whole cartoon, 167 pages. From this point an Animatic Editor will take my slug notes, the storyboard, and track to make the animatic. An animatic is a rough cut of the art timed together with sound. This will give me valuable information about timing and flow for the cartoon, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Thanks for stopping by and we hope to see you again in Hero Heights!

Raul Aguirre Jr.