Since 2021, I’ve had the pleasure of Art Directing Hailey’s On It!, a new series now available to watch on Disney+.

production

During Production, I’d work with the leads and production team to breakdown episodes, prepare handouts and provide the direction needed to launch the artists.

Colorscripts

I provided colorscripts for our lighting/fx heavy episodes. I also created gifs as needed to demonstrate how something could animate and discuss the FX with the EPs and directors to make sure everyone was on the same page.

Color Palette Breakdown

Along with the colorscripts, I created the color breakdown for each episode. During this process, I’d plan which color palettes we’d need and create these guides for the color team which showed what I was envisioning for each location.

Based on these guides and the colorscript, I created the color palette breakdown which served as a shot specific guide to our overseas team.

When we started production, I also designed the excel color handout document and filled it out for every episode. As production became busier, I trained the coordinators and our lead color designer to track the color assets and create the excel handout sheet based on the palette breakdown.

Art notes

I reviewed all the art assets the team created, paying close attention to areas where multiple departments had to come together and ensuring our designs worked for the action in the board. I most enjoyed taking the existing art and pushing it to hit the emotional cord the moment required.

Here are a couple examples:

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This section features BG designs by Wei Wu, Steven Ju, Orissa Jenkins, Victor Ha & Dee Chavez. BG Paint by Gina Garavalia, Chammy Kim, Grace Young, Chris Deboda & Ed Li. Character Designs by Christina Faulkner, Soyeon Yoo and Tim Moen. Prop & FX Design by Kate Wong & Austin Salmi. Color by Jaison Wilson & Krysti Pace.

Another fun aspect of this series was the departures from the established art style the story sometimes required.

In this episode, Hailey’s father, Kai, tells her a story about his past and we chose to create this stylized sequence that referenced their Hawaiian ethnicity. I designed and painted these backgrounds and shared the research I did into these designs with our cultural consultant who was excited about the level of detail and thought we put into this. Tim Moen designed the characters and Jaison Wilson and I colored them.

pre-production

In pre-production I would read the script and prepare reference materials to launch the design team. I did my best to leave a lot of room for the team to bring their ideas and creativity to the show and focused on providing very specific direction if I could foresee an issue arising or something becoming too complex without the proper guidance.

As an example, this episode had a giant chaos bot disguised as a crab on stage and the audience was being mislead into thinking this was an innocent piece of set dressing. I did these sketches to discuss how we’d conceal then reveal the chaos bot with the directors and EPs. It was a good solution which carried through to the final episode.

Another example is this episode that took place in a trampoline gym. There was a lot of action happening and I was concerned about how complex tracking numerous kids jumping in the background could become. Based on the action that had to happen, I proposed this “S” shaped design for the gym which placed foam walls between each of the trampoline challenges. This allowed us to keep the bg and character count manageable without compromising the action in the show.

BG Design by Victor Ha, Orissa Jenkins, Matthew Gallman & Dee Chavez. BG Paint by Grace Young, Emily Sadowski & Ed Li.

Post-Production

While remaining involved in pre-production and production, I worked closely with our Supervising Director, Post Coordinator and team of Technical Directors to review the animated episodes coming in from our overseas partners, call retakes and provide any necessary artwork and draw-overs to get the show to final.

Most notes end up being very simple adjustments like turning off a prop in the BG in a couple scenes or darkening the lines in an area of the BG where the character is standing so they fit better with the environment. Sometimes, we decide to do more substantial edits to really plus up a moment and these are fun to do. It could mean creating a new background, creating FX animation reference gifs or even creating a new scene.

Establishing The Design Rules

When I joined the project, there was a lot of beautiful development work that had been created. Our EPs were happy with art style so my task was to bring all the existing designs into a more cohesive place. They gave me the direction to design “a world worth saving” so I focused on creating a colorful and diverse world while managing the complexity of the designs for our team and our overseas animation partners.

I directed the art team to bring the existing art to final. Here’s a glimpse into that process:

Backgrounds

This establishing shot of Hailey and Scott’s house was in a good place, so I focused on bringing more color and atmosphere into the painting while making sure Hailey’s house remained the focal point.

For detailed locations like this garage, grouping the information within light and shadow helped direct the eye to where our characters would be standing. I relined this BG with a textured brush that fit better with our characters and closed most lines to make these backgrounds faster to paint.

This background section includes designs by Dee Chavez & Steven Ju and paintings by Ed Li, Emily Sadowski & Barry Atkinson.

Characters

Early in development Hailey and Scott had round eyes like Patricia’s before version. When I joined, Hailey and Scott’s eyes had been updated to be more angular and it was important to me that we keep our characters facial features more consistent so we could represent different ethnicities in a more charming and authentic way. I started by updating Patricia’s design to pitch this idea.

Once that direction was approved, I worked closely with Tim Moen, our lead character designer to update the rest of our cast.

Sometimes I provided detailed drawovers like this to show how we should update the proportions and adjust the level of detail to be more production friendly.

Other times, I provided reference images like these and Tim Moen ran with it, creating these charming updated characters . In this case, I wanted us to dig deeper into representing their personalities through their sense of fashion so we didn’t fall into designing stereotypes.

Here’s the updated lineup of our characters Tim Moen designed on based on the direction I provided.

I supervised our color designers Hollie Mengert, Jaison Wilson and Tiffy Wang to bring the lineup to final color.

This section features designs by Tim Moen, Christina Faulkner, Soyeon Yoo and Jose Lopez.

Style Guides

I worked with the department leads to create style guides for the BG Design, BG Paint, Character and Color departments. We were designing in Photoshop and doing color designs in Harmony so I also collaborated with the Disney TVA Technology department to create a design template that would allow us to import designs into Harmony with a script and speed up our color process.

Credits

Keeping with the theme of the show which sees Hailey try to complete every item in her to do list, I designed the end credits to be one of her scrapbooking notebooks featuring photo highlights of each episode.

Toys

We made these limited edition Beta plushies to celebrate the launch of the show and it was a really fun opportunity for me to give notes on toys and learn more about the process of adapting our characters to that medium.

Teamwork

I’d like to close by celebrating the incredible team I had that made this all possible. The show creators, Nick Stanton and Devin Bunje as well as our Supervising Director Howy Parkins were such a pleasure to work with and I appreciate the trust they put in me to bring their vision of this show to life.

During production, I worked closely with the department leads Tim Moen (character), Denise “Dee” Chavez (BG Design), Ed Li (BG Paint) and Krysti Pace (Color) to execute 56 episodes we are incredibly proud of. All the artists on the crew were so talented and hard working, their contributions to this project are invaluable. Our production team, the episodic directors, the writers, the technical directors, it takes a village to create the first season of a TV series like this and I really appreciate everyone who was a part of it.