Projections of hand-drawn animated characters.

Design

Kortjakje is a giant three-dimensional picture book, a digital picture book chockfull of technology. The idea was to avoid Kortjakje looking like a computer production. In order to achieve this, Mark drew everything by hand in ink, see the video. Ink is a changeable medium that leaves room for random effects and allows the artist’s personal handwriting to show through. By scanning the ink sketches and then computer-animating them, their spontaneous character remained untouched.

Bird characters by Mark van Huystee, copyright 2010.

INTERVIEWS
“Kortjakje doesn’t use just the final versions of his illustrations. From time to time, his earlier sketches reappear in the scenes, imparting the production with a refreshing lack of polish in spite of all the advanced technology and software used by its creators. Merkx: ‘The idea was to maintain the show’s simple quality.’” [Theater Magazine™ interview by Brechtje Zwaneveld]

“In order to keep as close to the original concept as we could, the drawings were left as rough and unpolished as possible. Van Huystee: ‘I don’t see a challenge in endless polishing. I try to use ink whenever possible. It has a fickleness about it, it’s less clear-cut than a marker.’ He studied overturned jars of ink and used Photoshop to invert the colours of a sheet of ink-stained paper. So, when it snows, Kortjakje is enveloped in a cloud of white ink spots. [Lezen interview by Annemarie Terhell].