BOOP - Bringing Cartoon Universe to Stage

Fray Studio was asked to create two distinct worlds for Boop! The Musical; one to place us in the black & white world of Fleischer's original Betty Boop cartoon, and the other in a hyper-real kaleidoscopic New York City. 

Tasked with developing a language and style for the cartoon world, my first task was to dive into the Betty-verse... The Betty Boop cartoons began in the 1930's and the style is not consistent or widely available in high resolution. Using what is available on Blu-Ray and the blessing of Fleischer Studios I rotoscoped anything and everything I could. Using these elements we comped together the scenes needed (sometimes having to think outside the box; such as making a stack of old film cannisters out of a pile of dirty dishes!)

In addition to scenic elements I also needed to create complex animations in the style of the original cartoons.  For example, to animate our own Rube-Goldberg-inspired 'Chicken-O-Matic'™ . These worked seamlessly with the set and stage illusions to bring Betty's world to life.

Having established both of these worlds in Act 1 our main challenge was the opening of Act 2 where the staging demanded a high level of finesse. 'Where is Betty?' involves the entire company being exactly in time, with lighting and video to reveal the magic trick that is that half of the costumes (including) shoes and make-up) is in black and white and the other is in colour. This created the illusion of jumping between one world and the other. 

In 'Where is Betty?' there are a mixture of animated elements; some of which were directly rotoscoped from the cartoons. The water towers were created by combining eyes and hands rotoscoped from the cartoons to our own characters illustrated by freelancer Heidi Brown. 

The choreography was fast-paced and there were lots of changes so we needed to work to timecode. I compared our animation to each rehearsal and preview recording and adjusted to match choreography until it was (hopefully!) almost frame perfect. The audience really enjoyed this number  - especially the first reveal as it would be a big surprise!

We had fun working on these cartoon-style animations and bringing Fray Studio's version of the Betty-Verse to life on stage. 

Letty Fox is a senior designer at Fray Studio and was lead animator on Betty Boop! The Musical