Animation Absorption: Looney Tunes Storyboard Discussion: "The Porklight" (Scene 1)

Link to the animatic for this discussion. Thanks to Rich Arons for sharing it online: https://vimeo.com/262094465

This will be a part analysis, part gawking session at how amazing the drawings are in this storyboard, so be prepared for that.

New Looney Tunes storyboard "The Porklight" boarded by Rich Arons,

directed by Sean Petrilak,

storyboard revisions by Aaron Chen and Sean Petrilak (Presumed)

The third cartoon of the series boarded by Rich Arons, The Porklight is his first starring the Porky and Daffy duo. This animatic has a date at May 13, 2016, and this is probably the final animatic that was shipped over to Yearim, the overseas animation studio, as there are clearly storyboard revisions added to Arons's board found all throughout the animatic.

The end credits of the episode this short is in lists two board revisionists, David Shair, and Aaron Chen. Looking at the revision drawings closely, and cross-referencing them with the past work of the two, I can safety presume that Aaron Chen (https://www.instagram.com/aaronchenart/?hl=en) was the revisionist on this short in particular. Sean Petrilak, the director, also seems to have provided help with the revisions, as his drawing style also appears a fair amount in the animatic as well (https://www.instagram.com/seanpetrilak/?hl=en).

The animatic starts with this stock title card placeholder put on the first shot of the background, which is the common method that NLT used for displaying it's titles and opening credit information.

This establishing shot starts off Porky's speech of introducing the Shakespeare film Hamlet to the moviegoers and establishing the rules of the theater. Providing the set-up for Daffy to be a rude audience member and destroy the classy atmosphere Porky tried to establish.

This is a Rich Arons Porky.

Some stutter acting drawings from him.

Porky's pupils get drawn into the center conjoined onto his eye in the first drawing, which is a cartoon symbol for confusion as Porky stumbles on his words. The second drawing displays a very subtle squash effect, as you can see that his eyes and nose becomes elongated on the release of his stutter cycle. Also he made use of his usher hat lifting up above Porky's head as he squashes down to add more wackyness to the action.

Porky gets back from his stutter and his normal speech poses from before are reused, but set in the opposite direction, which hides that the pose was reused.

You'll notice that the panel counter on the bottom right has a .tga extension on this pose that wasn't on the previous poses. I suspect that this is where the revision drawings were placed as scenes that have the .tga on them, feature the work of additional boarders other than Rich.

On https://richarons-portfolio-blog.tumblr.com/, you can see an unrevised version of Arons's board for this opening scene, and this proves that this was slightly revised. Even though the drawing is almost the same between the two, Porky's eyes were made to be completely open when he does this pose in the final animatic, which is better for the expression to work in my opinion. Half closed-eyelids look too confusing on a surprised expression.

An interrupted Porky tries to find who interrupted him. A good choice to make Porky's hand up there to block the bright light starring down at the center of him to see in the dark theater better.

These stutter drawings are reused here, but with the added hand placement of this section. His arm is stretched upwards when he does the stretch drawing. Smart reuse of drawings here to create different scenarios with the pre-drawn pose without wasting more time to draw an all new pose that's not necessary here.

This establishing shot is used again here for the wide look of Porky searching the audience. These are mostly revision drawings if you look really close.

These look like Sean Petrilak drawings, though the first pose only has Porky's face redrawn by him on a Rich Arons body. The second pose is entirely a revision drawing. Notice the cool graphic pushed chin design that Sean draws on his face here.

The way that Arons had Porky back to his speech was a little abrupt, as Porky randomly segways into explaining the fire exits without talking more about the movie that he was in the middle of explaining before being interrupted. This was eventually revised by Sean (with his drawings used as revisions) to add a additional line that Porky's lost his train of thought, as probably a way to have him transition into the fire alarm part with more of a believable explanation as to why he couldn't finish talking about Hamlet.

Sean's new drawings for this section. Porky does a head scratching action as he explains that he's lost his thought, with a confused look as to who exactly yelled. Sean did a new transition pose of Porky, with him trying to brush off the interruption that he might not even think was an actual interruption yet.

We return to Rich for the pose of Porky demonstrating both exits of the theater, which is set-up for Daffy's second and more rudely detailed interruption.

But then we jump into our next revision. Rich originally had Porky do into a completely new pose for him stuttering during this, but it was changed in animatic to only have his head go to a different pose, and the rest of his body remains the same. Done rather clunkily as you can see here, but undoubtedly time-saving by having to stitch together Porky's stutter head with Porky's resting body in the arms up pose. This was probably changed, because Daffy's remark for Porky to put his arms down would have made less belivable sense as Porky had put his arms down for the stutter in the original board, so they made it so Porky had his arms up during the entire part.

Sean added this antic drawing to flesh out the movement of Porky covering his arms. It's a very nice drawing. Sean draws with very nice gesture strokes in his roughs.

Daffy has the power to manipulate the poor naïve Porky to bend to his commands in the worst of times like when Porky follows Daffy's instruction to bend his arms down and make a fool of himself. Rich's pose is so funny, with Porky's arms tied down into his pretzel knot with Porky looking so embarrassed about the audience noticing his supposed smelly armpits, even when if he's from afar.

But Porky's able to go quickly back to his senses with a visible sense of anger in his face, looking for the rude patron. Rich adds some ripple effects to Porky's head to indicate that Porky's looking faster this time.

You can feel the escalated inner rage in Porky as the poses of him looking for the guy are more graphic in design. The closed fists really add to this emotion.

He puts his arm to his eyes again to search deeper within the theater, but under a more urgent notion to spot the offender.

Suddenly the phone ringtone (Which is the Power-Up theme from Super Mario Bros. in the animatic), alerts Porky to Daffy. Porky's face here is great, with the pursed lips and the elongated pupils, as he spots him.

We finally see Daffy in the cartoon, with him being as disrespectful a patron as he could be. Totally disinterested in anything Porky has to say, talking loudly, lounging in his seat in the wrong manner, and invested more in taking an internet survey than following the rules.

Porky dignifies himself by clearing his throat, and pointing his finger in an authoritarian way to remind Daffy that cell phones are prohibited.

But Porky just can't overcome his stutter, which Daffy takes as an opportunity to mess with him more. While one of the previous stuttering cycles was in Rich's original board, Sean added this stutter drawing at the bottom, probably because Porky is stuttering particularly intensely here with him fumbling over the words repeatedly, which probably required a more extreme stretch drawing to show it. His hat is well over his head in this drawing, along with the even more stretched out nose and eyes.

Rich originally had this planned for when Porky reaches for his ringing phone, but it was replaced with this:

These were all drawn by Sean, as has all of the revised drawings so far. You can especially see the differences between his style and that of Arons's. Porky looks like Hamton from Tiny Toons in Rich's boards, while Sean draws Porky in a more graphic design sense. Probably the reason to revise this section was to flesh out the acting of Porky getting his phone out, with more drawings, and to more clearly pose out him searching for it in his uniform by showing the poses of the folds. That and Porky's line read turned out to be not as nervous as Rich had expected it to be, so Porky's emotion is more of a bashful tone in the voice recording.

The first really Looney gag in the short, with Daffy's head coming directly out of Porky's phone, doing his best to expose Porky as a hypocrite who doesn't follow his own rules. I like how Daffy's neck sorta comes out of the phone screen. Porky's eyes in the last pose is great, with the pupils coming out of his white eye space to make good eye contact with Daffy.

Now the Porky/Daffy battle has officially begun proper with the two exchanging heated looks at each other.

Gotta love how Rich Arons constructs the faces. Porky has a pure 90s WB design sense in his face right here, which comes from Arons's extensive time directing and producing on Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, so you'll see a lot more similarities later on in the board. Daffy's devil face shows you that he just wants to mess up Porky's day at any means necessary throughout this cartoon.

Porky presses his phone button, which Arons depicts with three motion lines that show his hand quickly reaching to press it.

Daffy is sucked back from where he came from, with this silly face, showing off his screwball side with the elongated, spaced out eyes and exaggerated beak lips.

A little dust cloud indicates that Daffy's been pushed in.

Now Daffy has to escalated the cell phone gag to the extremes by demonstrating other even more loud and distracting things that can't be used inside a theater, the first being a pair of cymbals. Can I just say that Rich Arons's Daffy is drawing prefection? Just look at it. The elongated eyes and pupils. The long block teeth on some of his poses. I really like his version of screwy Daffy.

There's so much energy to the cymbal crashes, with the big long ripple smearing in the first and last pose, and the textured, scratchy cymbal crash FX drawings.

Great face. His long eyes, tongue, and row of teeth contribute to the silliness of Daffy's design.

Rich loves to take advantage of Daffy's duck lips for silly expressions such as this one.

The energy is great with how his legs extend out.

Instead of coming to stop Daffy, Porky is too naïve, so he just plainly opposes no cymbals. Porky looks so pathetic here with his ineffective authority guidance towards Daffy.

Next, Daffy suggest the Didgeridoo.

Daffy is coming up with all sorts of ways of standing on the chair, such as having his left foot on the chair handle, and his other on the proper seat. There's a good asymmetric flow with Daffy's eyes that make him look unhinged.

Great antic drawing, of him about to blow. His chest pumps up with all the air needed, and his whole long beak opens up for a nice view of his mouth.

He blows on it so hard that Daffy leaps from out of his seat, having his back bent up at all the energy required to play. His pupils are on different places of his eyes, which show the sheer amount of effort to play the difficult instrument.

Love how the didgeridoo blows up a nice stack of wind against Porky's face, on the sheer size of it alone.

Now Porky looks particularly crazy

Already, he looks to be losing his mind based on Daffy's craziness.

Daffy is proving his cunningness by giving Porky difficult words to pronounce, so that he turns into a blubbering mess of stuttering as he really struggles to just say Didgeridoo.

These are the first revisions drawn by Aaron Chen in this episode, aimed to matched the stuttering vocal delivery. His drawings are similar to Sean's in that it includes more construction lines, and can get sketchy at points, but Chen does cleaner linework in his drawings.

Daffy seizes this stuttering opportunity to list the other loud things really fast without Porky catching him. The next thing being this tuba, of which Arons reuses the first two didgeridoo scene drawings here, but he added the tuba, and adjusted Daffy's hand placement to accommodate the tuba.

But a different drawing is used for actually playing the tuba.

Note that Daffy gets lifted up in the air playing on the much larger than him tuba. Note his pupils display the amount of force from blowing on it. His pupils are just dark circles pushed down by the force with extra eye bags added to demonstrate the effort.

This tuba looks awesome. Really striking color design that mixes light and dark tones well of the black and white. Also appreciate the large music note that gets blown out of it.

Arons has Daffy get from one thing to another by using an extreme smearing effect. He uses ripples again to mask to the transition of the tuba turning into a blender.

Going to the blender now really gets us to the climax of this whole joke, of Daffy switching from just a normal cell phone, to actual musical instrument, to finally just random loud things that wouldn't make sense at all to bring to a theater.

The size of the blender is much larger than in real life, with it taking up half of Daffy's height, to make it more identifiable to the audience.

Rich has the blender do a wiggling motion effect when turned on. There's a multiple smear that's there to help sell that it's blending by being very wiggly.

Daffy smears into the next thing to annoy Porky with a chainsaw. This time, Rich smears both Daffy and the chainsaw, to a stunning smear drawing.

Both Daffy and the thing smears into him with a party toy, which he doesn't even know what's it called. Most people would just call it a part toy without knowing it's actual name, so it's a good joke.

This part toy spinning effect is so gorgously rendered by Arons. The amount of texture the toy has and the aftertrail it leaves off really displays how much it's being spinned by Daffy.

Meanwhile, Porky is still left in a stuttering slump as he fails to pronounce all the things that Daffy has.

The obscure party toy thing is what snaps out Porky from this by finally having no difficult name at all to pronounce.

The last thing that Daffy has is this bubble wrap, which is a Sean addition to the episode. I've put it on video because Daffy's fingers are very posed out at playing the bubble wrap. At first Daffy presses it very daintinly, but then stretches more of it, and plays it as a guitar, which is one of my favorite bits of character acting in the entire short.

Sean puts a lot of great elegant sharp design appeal into Daffy. Notice that the last one has such a nice flow of his angular beak.

I've also noticed that he poses Daffy's hand in a round shape when he daintily pops the wrap.

But when he switches into guitar mode, his hands become more angular to suggest playing it more intense like a rock star.

Porky finally starts stepping out and runs towards Daffy.

Oh, this is a great Arons drawing. It's like Hamton in Porky's face, with this short squat position while running, and the 'O' mouth he has.

The next shot is partially silhouettes, as the audiences in the foreground is covered in the dark movie theater shadow as our attention is placed on Porky on this shot, and also to avoid having to draw any budget and time-wasting character designs in this whole scene. Daffy ducks down in the audience to prepare his next moves against Porky.

Even when the audience is covered in shadow, we get a nice bit with Porky accidently ruffling a boy up among the tight crowd.

Chen added stuttering drawings (in the middle) to match up with Bergen's line delivery. Chen's way of drawing Porky involves drawing him more on-model than how Sean and Rich draw him.

Porky spots Daffy, ignorantly hair-drying his top hairs.

Arons draws Daffy making sure he looks good. You notice the very subtle effect of Daffy showing his teeth with the teeth lined up asymmetrically for his handsome smile.

What's a Porky/Daffy cartoon without a little bit of romantic tension? Love what Arons draws for a sexy Daffy, really utilizing his huge duck lips to look attractive but silly all at the same time with the mix of the bedroom eyes and the hairdo.

This misleads Porky into thinking it's not Daffy, so he stumbles his way into the next row.

We get a reuse drawings reversal for when Porky gets out of the front row, and then we some more Aaron Chen stutter drawings as he heads into the back row. A ton of Porky's stuttering drawings were added in by the storyboard revionists such as Chen, because the original boarder only gets the recorded episode 3 weeks into their 4 week schedule, so most of that has to be handed off to the revionists to tackle instead.

Take a look at how much unadultered glee Daffy's having right now, absolutely abusing his privileges as a theater goer, and making Porky suffer as much as possible. Literally just throwing a log into a shredder, for no other reason, then to just cause mayhem.

Porky asks Daffy very timidly, but barely gets two words in before Daffy rests his arm on Porky's usher hat, completely going to ignore whatever Porky has to say to him. Looking at Porky very smugly at his ineffective demands.

Daffy throws the shredded log to Porky in fake frustration and asks him to take over doing the shredding and finally decides to watch the movie normally. Poor Porky has this puzzled look and very Hamton-esque face of what is happening.

This finally causes Porky to snap, and throw Daffy out. Gotta love this extremely uncaring Daffy smug pose as he watches the movie without any consideration for the porker who he just gave a bunch of shredded wood to in a movie theater.