Jeff Yu Art: Mike Rowe Sweat Pledge and Video 1 + 2

Hi all, back in November of 2018, I participated in an incubator co-op between ASIFA-South and School of Humans here in Atlanta. The point of the incubator is to train each participant in skills to ready them for the creative industry. School of Humans provide the participants with a paid project to work on, and ASIFA-South trains the incubator members. The group were selected from a pool of half ASIFA members, and half from colleges around Georgia such as SCAD and Kennesaw University.

The project we ended up working on were a series of 12 videos that belonged to Mike Rowe's SWEAT Pledge. Mike from Dirty Jobs wanted to train graduating students from high school in skills that they can use to support themselves without having to pay exorbitant college fees. He imparts his decades of experience through the videos, and wanted our group to provide animated sequences that accompany the live footage SOH took from their interview with Mike Rowe.

I ended up working with the Asset Team to create backgrounds and other occasional items such as character art prep for rigging, and props. At one point I created revised storyboards for story 4 and helped troubleshoot the technical animation for the turbine scene in a later video.

Today I am posting up my background work for Scene 2 since that was when I was brought in to handle any tasks that were spilling over. Our art direction focused on a more cartoon-like style that uses simple lines and shading which helped make animating the assets easier.

The backgrounds I created in the earlier stages of the project featured vectorized images but later transitioned to larger artboards created in Photoshop and then exported as PNG files. This was because the line work got more detailed as time went on and quality improved. I primarily colored the scene after a line art has been completed by our incubator members Rian and Seth.