Batch 009 from "Our Frasier Remake"
This is the batch I initially animated for the crowdsourced fan project "Our Frasier Remake" created and organized by Jacob Reed.*
I'm a huge Frasier fan, thinking that it's far superior to its original Cheers. When it comes to the lead cast I'm partial to Niles for both his mannerisms and his character arc. (One of my favorite episodes is "Hooping Cranes" where Niles sinks the basket from half court at a basketball game with Frasier and Martin.
I knew I only had so much time to animate this when I signed up, so I had to be economical about it. Ultimately I chose to loosely rotoscope it in Animate. The challenge was to see how I could capture the essence of the character in the fewest lines and flat blocks of color. Given the audio, I knew I wanted to include the camellia garden and its transformation into a zen garden. Originally I thought I would have the blooms take over the background, but that felt too on the nose. Ultimately I settled on having the garden imagery contained to Niles's jacket. Because I was treating his body as flat color blocks without any lines, it felt like the most natural choice without it being too distracting.
To add more contrast the background was painted in Procreate, using my most loved textured brushes.
*See more about this below
And watch the full episode here!
GIF of the original scene
From Jacob Reed, creator of "Our Frasier Remake:"
I love Frasier. Joke-per-minute-wise, it’s one of the funniest shows that’s ever been on television. It’s infinitely rewatchable with incredible writing, performances, and some of the best farce episodes on tv (and possibly across all 20th-century mediums). The show received 108 Emmy nominations and a record-breaking 37 wins (surpassing the Mary Tyler Moore Show and only recently being beaten by Game of Thrones) it was a critical and pop-cultural juggernaut. I am a deeply sincere fan.
And still, I think it’s a little silly to reboot it.
So… Inspired by projects like Our Robocop Remake, Our Footloose Remake, and other fan celebrations, I'm putting together a group of artists, illustrators, filmmakers, and more and we are going remake a full episode of Frasier... frame by frame.
Batch 010 from "Our Frasier Remake"
Since I had such a good time animating the first batch and the deadline got extended, I decided to jump into another one. Thankfully the batch immediately following the one I took on was still available.
It was a really tidy way of bookending the 2 batches and making them feel like a resolved whole. In the OTS shot I animated Niles's jacket returning to its default state as Frasier chimes in about the garden. Taking a cue from my own experience with meditation, I chose to make the background go blank and then return to the full environment as a way to punctuate the dialogue.
I had some debate over adding minimal line work to his hands as he gestures. Ultimately I decided against it. Some of it was the quality of the reference video. The detail in his hands was fuzzy at best and I thought it would take away from the overall quality and be too distracting. The brothers Crane being shrinks, I felt the emphasis should be on their faces/heads and everything else is incidental.
Backgrounds of Cafe Nervosa
Painted in Procreate