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 generating the 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 on the wish list. Joe hand draws bits and pieces before we storyboard the idea for the card.

We use pencils, pastels and markers to splash colour about until we get the mood right. Then comes 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, you can sometimes capture the spirit of this amazing environment.

Jo can't draw, but she likes to have a go anyway!

What she can do is characterise creatures, noticing all the little things that make them so distinctive. She also comes up with the storylines, and whilst we'll leave 'talking fish' to the guys at Disney, 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 our incredibly talented musician friend, Alan Miller.