Archer Season 7 “The Handoff” - Process of how Archer falls out of a window naked

Hi guys! I honestly had never thought about making a progress post on how some of the crazy stuff in Archer gets from storyboards to the screen, so here we are! 4/7/2016 Season 7′s episode “The Handoff” had a wonderful shot of Archer, bloody and naked, falling out of a window. I had the privilege of taking on this task, which was actually a pretty long process.



I’m not ashamed to say that whenever files come up where someone is naked or mostly-naked, I try and jump on them before someone else grabs them up. They’re super fun to do, and I get to draw some naked people, which is honestly very helpful in learning anatomy and proportions.



So, to start off, this is basically what my comps look like by the end of everything. Lots of reference - photos we take in the studio as well as standing Archer bodies at different angles - and lots of layers. For scenes like this where we go from seeing a character at one angle to seeing them at a totally different angle, cutting down the amount of drawing we’re doing to the absolutely essential key frames is pretty important.



So, here is the original comp I made using reference photos we take of the lovely people in the studio. I made sure to get Eric “Sexy Pecs” Warren’s permission before sending his lovely face to roam across Tumblr. His Instagram where he posts his personal artwork in case you’re interested! You can see in this gif that a step was ultimately cut since we decided that the sequence could be done in three steps, not four. Most of these photos take arms, legs, and torsos from other photos to fit the limitations of the background elements: the characters can move while the window cannot, so it’s our job to make sure things line up properly!

We not only have to look at photo reference, but also keep proportions and body structure on-model with our Standing bodies. For this I always keep the bodies that I need to reference directly in my comp to check how long the arms are, how wide the hips are, etc. I clean up my lines, make sure the motion looks clean and works for the action dictated by the storyboards and script, and move things over to Illustrator.



Going off my linework, reference photos, and our Standing Body files, this is generally the way things go: Clean stroke outlines, fill color, lowlight color to define shadows and muscles, and finally adding all the proper blood and dirt in their respective places. Repeat for all bodies and voila!



I hope you guys learned a few things about how some of the naked animated magic works at Floyd Country Productions.