The Making of: e-Cards from Sketch to Animation & Music

• The Making Of…
• About Jo & Joe
• The Music

Joe is the artist behind the cards - he takes our ideas from imagination to screen, hand-drawing the scenes and then creating digital animations.

First we throw around the ideas for the cards. Some scenes, like the giant manta rays and reef squid, we have been lucky enough to see for ourselves. Others - like the timid seahorses - are still on the wish list. Joe hand draws bits and pieces before we storyboard the idea for the card.

We started out using pencils, pastels and markers to splash colour about until we get the mood right - but now we can do all of it on a graphics tablet. Once we have identified our main characters, we create static illustrations of them. We try to stay as true to life as possible although, obviously, some of the card's storylines are pretty unlikely! Once the artwork is all created, then we start the real work...

One of the many incredible things about the underwater world is the range of movements - different creatures move in completely different ways. Crabs and shrimps scuttle, boxfish (the tiny puffers that look like dice with fins) lurch about as if they've only just learnt how to swim, lionfish glide effortlessly, bubbles jiggle and shimmy, waves and light ripple and dart... it is endlessly fascinating, and is a constant challenge to do it any justice on screen. However with many, many hours' work, a lot of coffee, and occasional use of some pretty demanding mathematics (the anemones card, for example, is all built of maths) you can sometimes capture the spirit of this amazing environment.

Jo is an ideas person. She can't draw, but she likes to have a go anyway!

What she can do very well is characterise creatures, noticing all the little things that make them so distinctive. She also comes up with the storylines, and whilst we generally steer clear of 'talking fish' (Pixar do that pretty well already, we've noticed), we do like to inject as much fun as possible!

Jo is also in charge of all the really useful stuff that the site does, like birthday reminders, and what happens when a member in Hawaii schedules a card for the next day to send to a friend in the Phillipines, who is a whole day ahead and.. anyway, you get the idea!

The man behind the music is the incredibly talented musician Alan Miller. You can see what else he does on the Roundsound Studios site