Director Seth Worley took his 2020 short Darker Colors and expanded it out to the new feature-length film Sketch, which opens in theaters nationwide on Wednesday August 6th. It’s a live-action movie with some distinct animated characters, as the drawings of a girl named Amber come to life in powerful ways. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: How reliant are you on sketching out sequences [and] storyboarding? How much does that matter to you?

Seth Worley: A lot. My director of photography, Megan Stacey, and I didn’t have a lot of prep time on the front of the movie. And so we would spend the weekends of the shoot here in my office — there’s a whiteboard over here — and we’d walk through and act out every scene and shot listed storyboards up here on the whiteboard or on paper. It was incredibly important to have a plan going in. The most important reason to go into a shoot with a plan is so that you can throw that plan out when you need to and be improvising from a foundation, or be rethinking from a strong foundation — of having thought through the scene and understanding what’s important about the scene and what’s integral, so that when you have to cut things, it becomes a little bit of second nature because you’ve already done the work.

JM: There’s a pivotal bus scene, and there are so many monsters. They’re unique creatures. They’re colorful [and] visually very interesting. Tell me about the animation and the work that went into creating these characters.

SW: We had an incredible team of VFX artists on this that did some really crazy work. It was important to us that the monsters not look really specifically like anything that you’d seen before, which is hard to do. And I’m not saying we fully did it, but I will say that I feel proud that what we came up with was very unique and specific to our movie. And we wanted the monsters to feel like they were made of whatever [Amber] drew them with — meaning that they were physical creatures that felt tactile and real and existed in the space, but didn’t lose that asymmetry wonkiness of a kid’s drawing, and that they’d be both threatening and absolutely goofy looking at the same time. That’s a hard thing to do.

And so it took a lot of experimenting and we landed on this kind of approach… Essentially the monsters were sculpted and modeled in 3D just like any 3D model or 3D creature you’d see in any movie. But then rather than just texturing those models like you normally would, we instead had them be made up of what are called cloners. Essentially they’re just collections of a bunch of cards. And on those cards are transparent scribbles, like crayon scribbles. We modeled the monsters, but then instead of putting texture on their skin, we instead made their whole mesh made up of just a ton of crayon scribbles. So what you get is… this feels like a 3D tactile thing, but it also feels like it is scribbled on paper at the same time and my brain can’t really figure out where that starts and where the realness begins. And then just filling it with colored dust and chipping off of them all the time.

JM: Tony Hale is an excellent voice actor. He’s not behind the booth this time, but what he does with his comedic timing and his vocal inflections [as Amber’s dad] are so important in the comedic and the dramatic moments. What really impressed you about working with him?

SW: He’s a delightful, wonderful and incredibly generous human being. He is so good at what he does. And what I learned working with him is despite the fact that he’s known for some of the funniest characters in TV history, he is much less occupied with humor and comedy than I was expecting. His focus is entirely on character, reality and authenticity — and emotional truth. He was constantly coming up to me on set and being like, “Hey, I know that you really want a button for the scene, or you need to end this scene with a laugh. It feels like you want that, but I don’t know if we would be making jokes ’cause this big thing just happened.” He would be constantly aware of the big things that just happened that we are still emotionally reacting to. And it’s why the movie is so — especially his character — grounded. Even as this crazy stuff is happening, it feels real and it feels honest.

And it’s also the reason that his characters — going back and rewatching old stuff of his — are so funny and so resonating and great. He is coming at it from a completely honest and authentic place. He finds a way to play Buster Bluth real. He’s coming from an honest place, and that’s why that character is so funny. He’s putting character and honesty first, and it somehow just multiplies the laughs that you’d get from the material that’s been written for him. He’s the best.

JM: There’s a lot of honesty to the film. And you’re right: there are big moments with these creatures, and there are smaller, intimate moments as well that everyone’s gonna feel. This movie premiered last September at Toronto and was acquired by Angel Studios, which is releasing it nationwide. Earlier this year, they released the animated feature “The King of Kings”, which did very well. Angel is really having a huge impact when it comes to theaters and box office and the cinema experience for people of all ages.

SW: We’re excited. We are grateful that somebody like Angel was interested, saw the potential in our movie, saw the theatrical potential and is putting the work and effort behind it. We’re so excited for the world to see the movie.