Studio AKA: when the tech disappears and the artist takes over

To keep at the cutting edge of the industry, the studio has always embraced new ways to bring its ideas to life, right from the very early intersections of animation and technology. “AKA were doing a lot of wild and wonderful things when I joined them around 17 years ago, including using a lot of new technology,” remembers Steve Small, Director and Illustrator. “They were interested in alternatives and embracing technology, which I thought was marvellous. Back then, every time technology was used, it was doing something for the first time, so to combine a curious nature with new tech and deadlines and budgets was breathtaking.”

A foundation in 2D animation

Steve joined after working at a more traditional 2D animation studio, working on Disney features as a satellite studio and a range of other animations. The team included many European animators, who helped Steve realise a fundamental truth about crafting a career as an animator. The style of Disney animation was creative, but also repeatable and consistent across large scale teams and pipelines.

“My background was about evolving my hand-made processes so that I could create hundreds of iterations within an animation framework. Working with the more experimental European animators encouraged me to try things out on paper that I wouldn’t have attempted previously, and start to understand how you can make innovative ideas function, rather than simply slotting into a more reliable, tried and trusted method, but I quickly realised that you had to be honest about whether the spontaneous image you created could be sustained across a whole sequence or project.”

Welcome to the digital workflow

Although his previous studio had used technology sparingly, the extent that it was embraced at Studio AKA was initially quite daunting for Steve. He soon got his hands on an early Wacom tablet and started exploring a digital workflow. He smiles as he says “I always thought it must be like trying to play a game of tennis, I thought that doing something artistic here (he points to his Wacom), and seeing it play out on a screen there, was going to really hard to adapt to!”

Seeing his AKA colleagues using their Wacoms with such skill, as easily as if they were drawing on paper, made Steve determined to develop his own skills to rival his traditional abilities. “I would say I was pretty much teetering on reaching that level”, he says, “before Wacom brought out this wonderful beast!” He gives the large Wacom Cintiq that sits in his home studio an affectionate rub.

Capturing the experience of working on paper

Most of the Studio AKA team enjoy a hybrid life, working three days in the studio and two at home. To keep the transition seamless between home and studio, each artist has a very similar set up at home to their spot in the studio, typically a Wacom Cintiq with the latest Wacom drivers and HP Graphics Agent installed on their host Windows workstation back at the studio. The latest Wacom models capture the subtleties of pen pressure, working seamlessly with HP Anyware’s remote graphics technology, helping to replicate the experience of drawing or painting on paper. As the technology improves and becomes invisible, artists like Steve are free to focus on creating. “I really appreciate the effort that’s going into simulating all the materials and surfaces, I like that every surface I want to work on has different characteristics - there’s something about that tussle, the push-me pull-you that really appeals to me.”

Taking on the impossible

He admits that his conversion to digital illustration wasn’t instant, and believes his colleagues would probably think of him as a purist. “I used to challenge the digital illustrators – I’d meet the brief by hand and compare it to the digital work. I didn’t think digital work could mimic what I could do by hand. It sounds playful, but it was also a great way to explore, and push the limits of what digital could do. Needless to say, a good few years ago I stopped challenging them because there was always a way to recreate it in the digital realm.

“It made me aware of a more open space to try out other ideas that I probably couldn’t do on paper. It opened up a new box of toys that I can use as well as traditional paper. What I am keen on though is making sure that the origin of something is based on an idea, not just on something a piece of software can do. I want the software to answer the original artistic idea.”

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Raised By Wolves

A recent example of this is Steve’s work on the opening titles to Ridley Scott’s Raised By Wolves. These titles capture his painterly style perfectly. “I was able to be brushy, with strokes that feel unprepared. They have a certain instability about them. On several of the scenes, there’s a certain kilter to the strokes, a directional shimmer. In other words, exactly the same things you get when you make a real paint stroke. The Cintiq captured that the stroke was brisker at the top, firmer in the middle and slower at the end, creating this shimmer that came purely from the physical way I was making the strokes.”

As part of the process, Steve worked directly with Ridley, whom Steve describes as one of those rare people who is as much technician as he is artist. “We’d talk about the processes and techniques to get certain results, but it would get to a certain stage and he’d become hands-off, letting us do what we do. He’d come to us because of what we’d done with Black Earth Rising, and I knew he was interested in painterly animation because that’s what his Scott Free logo is. I love that he’s this visual director responsible for very solid, tactile imagery on film, and yet his logo is something much more freeform. It’s quite a span of aesthetics.”

Adding an emotional layer

Another project that showcases Steve’s recent work is ICEMAN, a documentary for the NBA on legend George Gervin’s life and struggles. Here Steve’s Wacom-based painterly approach helped to provide an additional layer to parts of the story that George himself was narrating.

As a living, recognisable person telling his story, the director asked Steve to think about how he could bring an emotional texture to some of the story, particularly as he’s relating some of the troubled events of his life.

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“We wanted to represent him faithfully. But as someone who spent a whole summer trying to do caricatures to earn money, I know that being accurate is not really what people want! So we wanted to put a relatable image on screen as the foundation, but do things to that image. So we explored photography, and making a reference model then layering photography onto it and running lights across it  – effectively allowing us to create a younger version on top of the recognisable frame.

“Our job was to evoke a sense of this person during certain events, so we eventually turned again to a painterly approach because that would let us be more impressionistic, while staying faithful.” The final work shows animated silhouettes of George at various times of his life. Events play out as montages within the silhouettes, and the whole thing is presented starkly in monochrome on a light background which buzzes with Steve’s brushwork.

These projects are just two of many that Steve and his Cintiq have worked on together, and with new models providing even more sensitive interactions between the illustrator and the screen, we can expect to see even more impressive, and impressionistic, work from Studio AKA in the future.

If you’d like to find out more about our work with Studio AKA and how we can help you, just get in touch.