Post by Allissoon Lockhart

PROP DESIGN PRODUCTION TRACKING- In 2D Animation! —— I’ll be going back to talking about Production positions later this end of the month. But I thought a fun topic to bring up would be PROPS! PROPS! We all have an idea of what a prop is! Also in animation, we probably are a bit cheeky and can tell what is a prop in a scene before it’s touched cause the line art calls it out.  But essentially and super super simply a prop is anything the character is touching, or I would like to say ANYTHING that is MOVING or animated outside the background and character. Sometimes it gets a bit whacky though! So I wanna talk about what's character and what's prop! And what's background and what's prop! CHARACTER VS PROP: Sometimes a part of a characters design is CHARACTER but if they take it off, interact with it, etc it is ALSO a prop (you’d need the perspectives of it from all sides and more). An example of this would be SpongeBob’s Krusty Krab hat. If SpongeBob is in his uniform he is probably (I’m not on that show) asset wise Spongebob_KrustyKrab_v1 or something; thats the character design. It’s a different design than his normal outfit. He has a name tag and the hat. But if SpongeBob takes it off and puts it down. Or it gets run over by a car/boat. It gets caught on the grill fire. It will be a prop and we will need all angles of it. +Plus with something so heavily used, once its designed as a prop sheet it becomes apart of the library to be used again And the opposite can happen. Something can start as a prop & then become apart of the char. design. BACKGROUND VS PROP: In backgrounds we usually see a lot of intractable objects! That’s the fun of detailed backgrounds. But unless they are moving/animated they don’t need to be Prop designed. They stay apart of the background. Sometimes backgrounds have layers in them and those can be animated but that background is being animated not a specific prop. When we have a prop that is going to be animated in the shot and it’s in the background, it needs to be a prop. Peter Griffin going to pick up the coffee mug thats been on the table cause he’s about to throw it will be given a PROPER (hah) prop design sheet. Most often it stays a prop and isn’t in the background. But if it’s something we normally have in the background forever (for shots, for episodes, for seasons) but now it’s going to be touched we’d have that background not have it and have it be a prop instead. Whose doing these Prop Design sheets? The Prop Designer of course! They are make "character" sheets for props: have multiple angles, colors for time of day, all that jazz! Who tracks these assets? The Design Coordinator & Color Coordinator, there isn’t a Prop coordinator BONUS fun down below! #animation #art #artist #producer #production #cartoon #tvshow #2danimation #3danimation #animationstudio #storyboard #tv #movie #animationart #disney #preproduction #postproduction #design #characterdesign #storyboardartist #animationindustry #prop