Storyboard BTS on Looney Tunes Cartoons short "Grand Canyon Canary" by Michael Ruocco

 Original link to thread: https://twitter.com/AGuyWhoDraws/status/1485367469954912258

Another Looney Tunes Cartoons board: I boarded "Grand Canyon Canary" right after the 2nd batch of Telephone Pole interstitials, so I kept the Sylvester/Tweety rhythm going. Also, my pun title game was a victim of my growing burnout by this point...sorry!

Oddly still proud of this gag.

As well as this one...

I've said it before, but Tweety is still the hardest Looney Tunes character for me to draw, and I certainly struggled with this short. Here's one of the very few Tweety panels I did like and felt good enough to share.

Sylvester and the donkey, on the other hand, were a blast.

Alex Kirwan did this super appealing sketch of the donkey during our launch meeting, so I pretty much used it verbatim in my boards. Later, Bob McKnight, who did the final designs and special pose designs, ended up designing the (really cute) donkey you seen in the final cartoon.

By this point I was starting to cut back on my "overboarding", posing out my boards too heavily, except for maybe a handful of shots I felt needed it or looked fun to do. I didn't NEED to pose out breakdowns of the donkey's excited gallop, but I really had fun doing so anyway.

An old gag, but if it ain't broke...

My favorite thing to do on this short was finding fun ways of hurting Sylvester, a close runner-up being concluding the donkey/carrot arc.

Mountain goats really are nasty. And HUGE. I looked up footage and ref for them on YouTube and they're super powerful, scary creatures.

I just really wanted a giant semi-realistic mountain lion paw.

I remember my mouth feeling really dry while drawing this scene.

Our prop designer, Thaddeus Paul Couldron, designed ALL the props on our series, and he drew them all with good ol' fashioned paper and pencil! And I remember being blown away by his final design of the tower of props. He added some fun ones, I especially remember a pinball machine!

Being a board artist on a show like this is the closest thing to playing God I can imagine, for I can giveth, and I can certainly taketh away...

And that's that! Gotta acknowledge my (always patient-with-me) director David Gemmill, and particularly the AMAZING art direction and BGs for this short, headed by Aaron Spurgeon and his team! I had Ahmed Gamal's tonal pass on the opening pan shot hanging at home for a while!