Season 10 MythBusters!

Alrighty, the first few episodes have aired and I can safely reveal all! I especially want to talk about the Indiana Jones episode, because: a) it’s my favourite and b) it was the first Season 10 episode I worked on, and was my great big guinea-pig for the new graphics style I had half-formed in my head.

Fans of the show will be familiar with the old cut-out puppet animation on a blueprint background:

This was a pretty versatile style. The blueprint acted as a nice sky texture, and the white-outlined caricatures became very recognisable as the ‘MythBusters Style’. I started on MB nearly 3 years ago, so I inherited this style and did my best to stick to the jokey, cute nature of it. But for Season 10 I was asked to completely reinvent the animations, to make it less childish and more informative.
A bit daunting, but I already had an idea which way I wanted to go: something of a technical-drawing or ikea manual. (With plenty of inspiration from Portal and, weirdly enough, a Dove commercial)

This is the animation I tackled first:

And here’s the half-dozen storyboards I made for it. Usually I don’t get into this much detail or colour for storyboards. But this was all super-tentative, and neither I or the bosses knew for sure what we wanted yet.

So, as much as the parchment background appealed to me the decision was to go with #3. We wanted something consistent, a look that would stay similar throughout an episode (and season). I ended up re-using the old blueprint as a light grey texture – it added something nice to the background. Adam-as-Indy and his accessories were all hand-drawn because drawing is fun (I’m selfish) and to better resemble the old 70’s tech manual art. The action was less slapstick too. I found a lot of opportunity for more subtle humour in the captions & drawn objects.

And y’know the best bit about this new look? Hand-drawn animation!
You’ll know from Bullet Baloney that I’m a sucker for that stuff. The next animation needed for Indiana Jones was the ‘Temple Run’ scenario, where I needed to highlight the step-trigger and poisoned darts.
Here’s some work in progress if you like seeing roughs:

Indy inked in:

And the final beast, with a temple environment inspired by Adam’s scale model.

Thanks for reading, folks. And I hope you’re all enjoying the new MythBusters. I personally really like the new science-focused take on the show. These days it’s actually difficult to make a TV show that doesn’t dumb everything down, grab you by the hand and rush you to the next explosion. There’s a lot of pressure from external forces to make everything more of a spectacle.
Don’t get me wrong, there WILL be plenty of boom and mayhem this series. But I like watching closely how Adam and Jamie make their contraptions, and there’s definitely more time spent on that now than before.
Catch ya later.