Transformers Botbots

Transformers BotBots

Role: Art Director
Client: Hasbro / Eone

When the lights go out at the mall, the BotBots come out to play. Meet a fun-loving crew of everyday objects that morph into robots at closing time. In April 2020, whilst at Boulder Media, I was asked to develop the visual style of Botbots, an upcoming Transformers TV show created by Kevin Burke and Chris "Doc" Wyatt . For about a year and a half, I worked closely with the showrunners, with director Paul O'Flanagan and many more talented folk at Boulder Media, developing the look and location designs of the show. The original brief from Hasbro was to have the robots Alt Mode(their everyday object mode) done in a "photorealistic" way. Strucking the balance between the need of comedic, whacky fun of 2D characters on one hand, and the "cold" photoreal look of the world they live in on the other, was single-handledy probably the hardest task I faced so far in my career.

IMDb

Below you can see a selection of the early days vis dev. In this phase everything was pretty floaty so we had to constantly try elements and see how they would fit together. Initially we started experimenting with stock photography as a base for the backgrounds, but we had to drop the idea fairly quickly when we realized it would be way too time consuming, and not particularly reusable.

Style Frame Breakdown

One of the earliest test I made while researching the style. Here's a step by step breakdown.

Character design by Paul O'Flanagan

After further exploration, we settled on using 3D stock assets as a base to build our world. Still, we had to keep costs down where possible and so we came up with fairly flexible rules for assetts, that could be either 2D drawn (eg small characters props), stock photos or 3D model (eg character Alt Modes, Backgrounds etc). All in all it a fairly fluid and reliable process. Below a selection of style frames, test renders and production notes.

Stillframes from the show.