With his Olaf short series, Hyrum Osmond shows how animators are keeping on during self-quarantine.
“‘When hes not saving the world with Anna and Elsa, what does he do?’
was the idea,” Osmond, alsoMoana’s co-head of animation, tells EW.
Hyrum Osmond
The pitch was a hit.
“I had to do it by myself.
There were no resources for me.
Disney
They said, ‘Just go.’
And I did.”
“Then,” Osmond adds, “everything changed.”
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States even now, the entertainment industry essentially halted.
Productions have been postponed, film releases have been delayed, movie theaters have largely shut down.
The Disney veteran already began developing the concept from home when Americans were urged to shelter in place.
Two of them, EW has learned, will be hand-drawn.
“My workflow at this point is pretty productive,” Osmond says.
Its flowing pretty well."
New stories were becoming fewer and fewer.
“Theres just a real desire to put a smile on kids faces,” he says.
“I told her, ‘Ive actually been developing these.’
There’s not much to the shorts themselves.
As the character often expresses, he loves making friends.
The shorts are “sweet and calming,” Osmond says.
And his kids agree.
At his home, Osmond operates day-to-day off of two Mac laptops.
“The screens are maybe a fifth of the size of what Im used to,” he notes.
When Osmond started out by himself on the Olaf shorts, he had to be creative.
Without the backup of other animators, he decided to repurpose scenes from theFrozenmovies to help streamline the process.
Video chats with Osmond also helped.
Now, Gad has “a little setup at his house that he would then record to his computer.
We could listen to it, really, and say, ‘That peaked a little too much.
Lets go back and have him do it again.'”
What Osmond and his at-home team have done signals larger implications for the animation industry.
Where live-action productions just can’t go, animators have found various ways to adapt to the environment.
Other studios, including ones behind Fox shows, Nickelodeon, and Warner Bros.
Animation, are said to still be in development on multiple animated projects in various capacities.
“Thats the thing which I found really great about this.
That includes Disney’s technical support crew.
Osmond notes how the troubleshooting process is still the same.
Typically, those would all be resolved online anyway.
It’s the same method right now.”
But he says it’s manageable.
Now, let’s see if animated feature filmmakers are able to do the same.
But it is working and Im grateful for that.”
