The Legend of Vox Machina holds a special place in the hearts of all our crew. I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of this dream project as the Art Director for the last four years. The origin of the show is like a fairy tale: a group of friends playing a role-playing game on Twitch garnered enough support to launch a Kickstarter campaign for an animated adaptation. By the close of the campaign in 2019, “Critical Role” fans had shelled out more than $11.3 million, making the fundraiser the most successful film or television project in Kickstarter history. Their fans were generous beyond their wildest dreams, raising enough money to fund an entire season of animation, and leading to a green light from Amazon Prime Video to make a second season. And then a third.
As creatives, we all want to see individual creators succeed – to make something unique that captures the imagination of the world and continue thriving despite overwhelming odds. That is the story of our show, and the talented staff who continue to give it their all every day.
At Titmouse, we were tasked with adapting this mammoth story into something succinct and approachable for the uninitiated audience-to-be, while still remaining respectful to the copious source material. Sam Riegel, Travis Willingham and Matt Mercer have been our gracious lore guides for the past four years. The notes we receive in meetings are always coupled with thoughtful context about the larger picture of Tal’dorei and the continents beyond. It leaves the entire art team with a sense that we’re helping to expand a living world, rather than simply building within a set of immovable rules. That freedom is handed to our writers and then to our storyboard artists, led by Sung Jin Ahn, our supervising director. We’ve been lucky to have an incredibly talented team of directors and storyboard artists from day one. In many ways, their job is to be a character actor and a cinematographer and a fight choreographer all at the same time. We pray for them.
In the design department, we’ve been immensely lucky to have Phil Bourassa in our corner since the very beginning. The character designs truly are the core of the show. Every aspect of our design philosophy (whether it’s a background, a prop or a CG dragon) must flow from the same source. All walk a narrow line between stylization and realism, borrowing design ideas from anime and western cartoons simultaneously. In many ways the background team and the character team were tasked with the same goal: find a design that not only satisfies the needs of the story, but gives additional flavor and context to the setting. We dug deep into the campaign guide to learn the history of each town, and where there wasn’t something written, we embellished and built our own stories to help flesh out each alleyway, town plaza, or incidental villager. Our job as designers isn’t simply to translate, but to become writers in our own right.
The next piece of the design puzzle is our color department. Howard Chen painted all of our color scripts during the second season, and those scripts became instrumental in tying together the lighting information for the color designers and compositors. Together with our color stylists, we married the character designs to our detailed background paintings. The intent with the color design of our show was always to find interesting ways to push a little bit more saturation into the complementary colors of our light and shadows. The story of Vox Machina is wildly varied, packed with absurd humor, world-threatening evil and a fair bit of romance. That amount of tonal shift demands a full color palette, and we explore all of it throughout the course of the show.
The CG department is responsible for the most technically challenging component of the show—our dragons. Starting with concepts by Visual Development Artist Christine Bian, each dragon is the product of months of development, revisions and lots and lots of hand painted texture. In addition, each one poses its own design challenges due to their vastly different anatomies. From Umbrasyl to Kamaljiori, each CG beast was a massive learning experience for the whole team.
While it’s mainly story and design folks who will be posting their work this week, know that we couldn’t have built any of this without the tireless efforts of our production staff. They are the backbone of the entire project, supporting our artists by ensuring that our visual assets are organized and accessible for the different teams to use and draw inspiration from. They bridge each team to the next, creating something that is definitely stronger than the sum of its parts.
And finally, the most important component of any show is the fans who watch it. The support of the Critters quite literally made this show a reality, and altered the course of all our lives. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to bring this beautiful story to life.
