This project with director Josh Mahan and the team at Mosomos for the Oxygen Network won multiple awards including a silver 2019 Promax award for Art direction and Design in Animation.

For my role, I wore multiple hats, as Production Designer, Storyboard Artist and even puppet fabricator.

The idea was to create a winter wonderland where things don’t all go as planned in Tinseltown.

The visual direction was akin to Rankin-Bass meets Richard Scarry from the age of Golden Books. Streamlined, a bit mod, and very whimsical.

To achieve this look, I tried to push shapes and draw focus with bright simple colors. Earlier exploration included subtler questions of Elf and deer rights and representation and far sloppier versions of Santa:

Which eventually evolved into a squatter, “friendlier” version of Santa and a play on size with the lead officer and her elf sidekick:

Vehicular and prop development and exploration focused on holiday themed police accessories and similarly exaggerated proportions:

During the fabrication process, I also drew side views which were then printed to scale after which I started the sculpting process:

As the story artist, the goal was to frame beats in a crime scene investigation type look to punctuate a darkly humorous story. I tried to reveal little hints and pieces of the surrounding backstory which only get funnier with repeat viewings.

Here is the initial board-a-matic:

And here is the frame by frame set of boards:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Oxygen was cute enough to produce a making off piece and commission three more teaser shorts to go with the final:

View this post on Instagram

Well hohoholysh*t @oxygen put together a cute little #BTS for our #animation made with @joshmahan and the team at @mosomos.studio . As you can see so much work was put into it for #Santa to jingle his b??lls. It all started as scripts and my #drawings for the #design and #storyboards before the whole team came together to #fabricate and #animate our own tiny #Tinseltown . Thank you @oxygen and the whole team!

A post shared by Julia Liu (@lolsup) on Dec 8, 2018 at 5:24pm PST

Thanks Oxygen for the lovely opportunity and thanks Promax for the honor!