Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

2001
GameBoy Advance
Character Animation

After graduating from the Vancouver Film School (VFS) Classical Animation program in June 2000, I went back home to Minnesota and started searching for a job in animation. I was thrilled to quickly land a gig doing Digital Ink and Paint at Reelworks in Minneapolis. I was so excited to be working at a studio where Pete Docter used to work. I had been a fan of his since seeing his student film "Next Door" at a Spike and Mike animation festival in the 90's.  

That summer was a stressful blast of doing animation tests for The Simpsons, Rugrats, Spy Groove, and the one I was most excited for - Invader Zim. Alas, I kept getting passed over in favor of people who didn't have to relocate halfway across the country. At least, that was what they told me. It seemed a better reason than my work not being good enough, so I believed it. 

As summer turned to fall, 2D animation jobs were evaporating. Shows were getting cancelled. The press was declaring 2D animation dead. It was depressing. I was browsing AWN.com for a job in animation, and came across a listing for a place called "KnowWonder." It was a 2D animation job for a GameBoy video game. Pixel animation.

I had never done pixel animation before, but I was hungry for work as an animator, so I applied. Apparently Royden Lepp, a fellow graduate from VFS, was in the room when they reviewed my VHS portfolio at the KnowWonder studio. He put in a good word for me, and they sent me a test. My test? It was to create a 32x48 pixel animation walk cycle of a character wearing jeans a striped shirt.  Based on the description, I thought it would be a Where's Waldo game, so I made the character look like Waldo.

It took a few attempts to wrap my head around working at that tiny size. I started by trying to figure out how to convert what I had been trained draw on paper into such a small resolution. I tried drawing it on paper, scanning it, and down sizing it in Photoshop. It took one quick test to realize that would not work. Then I started just drawing with pixels. After a few stressful hours I had something that I felt pretty good about, and sent it back to the team at KnowWonder.

Not long after, I was on the phone with a man named Steve Ettinger (who would later be known amongst us as "Grampa GameBoy") I remember the excitement as Steve slowly built the suspense before telling me the the big secret - I would be working on: "Harry Potter." **mind blown** (He definitely had fun with the big reveal!)

I had heard of Harry Potter, but had not read it yet. I had been buried too deep in my studies at VFS to have time for anything that wasn't cartoons. But I had heard about it on the news, about how it was creating pandemonium amongst kids. Kids were flocking to bookstores and it was really big news! I knew it was a very big deal. I couldn't believe my luck. I was going to work on something amazing. I rushed right out and bought myself a GameBoy Color, the GBC game for The Road to Eldorado, and the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and it was FOR WORK, and I couldn't tell ANYONE! 

With my stuff packed up, I drove cross country on Wednesday November 8, 2000, the day after the Bush/Gore election. I had wanted to leave on election day after voting, but due to a blizzard I had to wait. It felt like I drove 30 miles per hour across all of South Dakota because of the snow. Royden offered to let me crash at his apartment while he was out of town for a few days. I devoured Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, looking for any and all details I could use in making art for the game. It was so exciting! My whole world became Harry Potter for the next year.

My first day at work was November 15, 2000. In my first team meeting, I remember pitching an idea about having a sneaking mechanic with Crookshanks. We got access to a few production photos, but we learned about the casting of the kids online with everyone else. One image that remains burned into my mind though was the concept art for Rik Mayall as Peeves. I had been a fan of Rik Mayall for years from The Young Ones, and the Dangerous Brothers. I thought he was PERFECT for playing Peeves. If I remember correctly, we didn't find out Peeves had been cut until we saw the movie. He remains in the GBA game, with the character design based on the concept art.

I got to spend every day drawing tiny pixel animations of Harry Potter, then Hermione, Ron, Draco, all of them walking, casting, and idling in 5 different directions. All animations done facing north, northeast, east, southeast, and south. The southeast facing walk cycles were the hardest to draw by far. For the western facing animations, the art was flipped horizontally by code. This ended up being a point of contention between our studio and Warner Brothers. Harry was right handed. To address this, we ended up creating a full rotation set of sprites for Harry so that the wand would always correctly be in his right hand. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but those animations took up a lot of space on an 8 Mb cartridge.

After 6 months, I was feeling pretty awesome about how my work was turning out. I had just finished a roughly 20 frame animation (quite luxurious at the time) of Harry mounting his broom to play Quidditch when E3 hit.

It was May 2001, and this was the first big show with a lot of new GBA games being promoted. Everyone was freaking out about how amazing Tony Hawk looked. The characters looked like 3D models! Players thought they were actually playing a 3D game on a GBA! "3D look" became EVERYTHING. 

We had 4 months until the unmovable ship date. It was crucial for the game to be on store shelves in time for the movie release. We threw away all hand drawn character animation and replaced it pre-rendered sprites of the 3D characters and animation that had been done by the team working on the PC game. Fortunately the hovering book could stay, I've always loved that animation.

I had to learn 3DS Max REALLY FAST. Quite daunting for someone with zero 3D experience. We spent days experimenting with different cameras and export settings. Trying to find the cleanest renders possible, but they still turned out so poorly that every frame had to be hand polished, especially the trim of their cloaks - the important colors that denoted house affiliation.

The deadline was hurtling towards us. The team at EA UK started to worry whether or not the team would be able to complete the game in time. In a drastic move, they decided to move the entire team to their UK offices for an indeterminate amount of time. I was even more excited! I had always wanted to go to England. But before I could go get my passport, they decided that they would only bring the engineering team, and the producer. The lowly artists had to stay behind in the pixel mines of Kirkland and continue working copious overtime to clean up 3D rendered sprites. These were pre-EA Spouse days as a 3rd party developer for EA. Good times.

Half our team was toiling away in the under the watchful eye of EA UK, fighting off hotel spiders, and navigating through an active encampment of nomadic gypsies that had swarmed the EA UK campus. They got to go to Paris for a day while work visas were settled. The rest of us pushed pixels in a dimly lit room in Kirkland, Washington. As a consolation, engineer Champagne Mac sent me a gift certificate to get my first professional massage. At that point in my life, was one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for me. I would have preferred pixel pushing in the UK. (pout pout)

On September 11th, 2001, after the World Trade Center fell, I submitted my last file check in on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (GBA). I remember being outside, smoking a cigarette, and chatting with one of the guys from EA UK who had been embedded with the team. It was the saddest day.

Shortly after that, we submitted the build to Nintendo, and the game was on store shelves nationwide on November 16, 2001.