B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11 "Chill of the Night!" Directed by Michael Chang.

"Chill of the Night!" was an episode set out to have a very different tone than previous episodes and is probably the darkest the series ever got. To reflect that, we approached the color a little differently. The usual orange skies of Gotham were now replaced with a red to give the city even more of a sense of dread. This is closer to how the color pallet for Gotham was in "Batman: The Animated Series" and just like B:TAS, we placed a lot more black shadows on the backgrounds. Another color pallet change in this episode, was that Craig Cuqro and Christina Long in color key department replaced the blue in Batman's costume with almost all black. Again, another way that color was used to shift the tone of the episode even darker.


"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11 "Chill of the Night!" Directed by Michael Chang.


Here's an example of how important it is that the background paint department and the color key department work together. When both departments are in sync, it should look like the color was done by one person. This episode was to have an almost nightmarish feel to it so we pushed to background colors to an even more surreal pallet. As weird as the colors are in this night club scene are though, notice how Craig and Christina have keyed the character on the right so she "sits" in that background. I put a copy of the character without the background (furthest to the right) to show how far they had to push her colors to fit into that background.


"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11 "Chill of the Night!" Directed by Michael Chang.


Sometimes the director wants to make sure that shadows and color for a shot are a certain way and we don't have a specific background layout for it, I will do a little comp for it like this one here.


"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 11 "Chill of the Night!" Directed by Michael Chang.

For the montage sequence in this episode, I did a color script to cut down on the amount of finished backgrounds for the episode. I wanted to use a limited pallet for this scene, but unfortunately (for whatever reason) overseas made the caves brown instead of blue as I have them here. It doesn't look horrible, but I do cringe when I see the finished scene knowing what I intended it to look like. Oh well, you win some, you lose some I guess.


"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 10

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 10, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 10 "The Power of Shazam! " Directed by Ben Jones.

"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9 "The Super-Batman of Planet X! " Directed by Michael Goguen

This episode is one of my favorite episodes of the series. I think it's everything that is right with "The Brave and the Bold". It's weird, it's fun and it places Batman somewhere you wouldn't see in any other Batman show. Plus, we have both Diedrich Bader and Kevin Conroy voicing Batman in the same episode!

One of the challenges of Brave and Bold was that almost every episode was art directed from the ground up, which makes it challenging to produce in the time allotted. Like many of the B&B episodes, there were no reused backgrounds from previous episodes used here and the backgrounds seen here were only used for this single 22 minute episode,

"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9 "The Super-Batman of Planet X! " Directed by Michael Goguen

Around this time I saw the documentary "Journey to the Edge of the Universe" narrated by Alec Baldwin. I loved how crazy space looked in that film and decide that whenever possible, I would depict space in "Brave and Bold" similar to how it looked in that film. I think it looks way more fun than just a black background with stars on it. If you haven't seen "Journey to the Edge of the Universe", do so...you won't be disappointed.

"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 9 "The Super-Batman of Planet X! " Directed by Michael Goguen


All of the "Planet X" backgrounds seen here by the way, were drawn by Paul Rivoche. I was a big fan of Paul's since I saw his work it in the "Mister X" comic book years ago and it was really cool that I got to work with him here. Paul has a great blog that you should check out too:

www.rocketfiction.com/





"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 8

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 8, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 8 "Sidekicks Assemble!" Directed by Michael Chang.

"Meanwhile at the Hall of Justice...". I remember hearing that as a kid and thinking that this was the coolest show ever. Looking back at those "Super Friends" episodes, they don't look as great as I remembered them but, I think the six year old version of me would have been mighty impressed that I got to paint the "Hall of Justice" for Brave & Bold.


"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.

Brave & Bold "Color Cave" door sign

Brave & Bold "Color Cave" door sign, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

I thought since I was showing the background paintings for Brave & Bold, I might as well show where they were made.

This is a little sign I made for the color department's room which we dubbed "The Color Cave".

The Brave & Bold "Color Cave"

The Brave & Bold "Color Cave", a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

This was the second location for the Brave & Bold color department and was where we did the tail end of season 2 and all of season 3. The room was originally for computer servers and because of that, the room had AC blowing constantly. This made the room occasionally noisy, but it was a really fun room to work in. Since everyone in the color department was in one place, it made it easy for us to communicate with each other and we had a lot of laughs when we were working here.

The color department for season 3 was myself, Craig Cuqro, Christina Long, Hector Martinez, and Eric Nordberg. I annotated the desks here so you can see who sat where and who did what in the color department (click on the picture to see the annotations).

The Brave & Bold "Color Cave" (lights out)

The Brave & Bold "Color Cave" (lights out), a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

This is what the room usually looked like. We kept the room dark so it we could get an accurate color reading from our computer screens.

Not shown in this picture though is a table we had in the middle of the room. We would have meetings with the directors and go over the storyboards to take color notes. Also, this table was used to place seemingly never ending parades of donuts and baked goods on it. God help you if you are on a diet and you worked in this room.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 7

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 7, a photo by William Joseph Dunn on Flickr.

B:TB&tB season 2 episode 7 "A Bat Divided!" Directed by Ben Jones.




"Batman: The Brave and the Bold" ™Warner Bros. Animation.