The Bar

I was just clearing away some boxes from around my desk at home (the drawing board is needed this weekend, thanks to a looming commercial deadline) and I came across more rough sketches of the Ripov's Bar exterior. It's funny leafing through this stuff so long after the sequence was finished - although I remember doing the final backgrounds and animating the characters I can hardly remember all the rough sketches and design ideas that preceeded them. It's like flicking through a lost diary you don't ever remember having written...

Ripov's Bar was - like all the backgrounds in the film -
inspired by a real London location. I chose this place
to give us our basic building shape, with details added 
from a couple of other bars I'd spotted.

Back-of-the-envelope style scribbles, trying
to figure out two angles of Wally approaching
the exterior of the bar.

I would have doodled this while talking through
the shots with Mark Naisbitt.



Using my rough layouts, and the photo reference of real
locations, Mark begins to construct the final layout...

...piece by piece...

...even figuring out the neon lettering in perspective...

...until we have the final thing. I would then take Mark's
pristine layout,  paint it, and then 'mess up' the linework by
 drawing over it freehand with pencil or ink. This gave us the
 hand-drawn feel, but with a solid technical structure underneath 

Here's the final shot.

And the reverse angle.

I found a bunch of other doodles, sketches and photo reference in these boxes - I could easily lose an afternoon reminiscing through this stuff... but my commercial deadline is beckoning. More next time.