Jun 2, 2020

How to create a haunted house of "Scooby Doo": Step by step with "Scooby Doo"!'Production designer Michael Klinsky

A venerable 2d property's shift into 3d is a vulnerable moment, with plenty of hazards. Scoob!, the first Scooby-Doo feature to be fully cg-animated, weathers the transition well, preserving the playful cartoonishness that has become a hallmark of the franchise across half a century.

A large chunk of the credit is due to Michael Kurinsky, the film's production designer. Having worked as a background artist at Disney (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mulan, Tarzan) and a visual development artist and production designer at Sony Pictures Animation (Hotel Transylvania 2, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Emoji Movie), Kurinsky has honed his feel for light, color, and set design across both 2d and 3d - a skill set that prepared him well for Scoob!

The film opens with an origin story for Scooby-Doo, Shaggy, and their mystery-solving buddies. The group meet as children one Halloween night, and swiftly end up the Rigby House, which is ostensibly inhabited by a ghost. The haunted house is the most iconic of Scooby-Doo locations, and so this prologue encapsulated Kurinsky's core challenge throughout the production: to make things look at once fresh and familiar.

Below, Kurinsky talks Cartoon Brew through the process of designing the scene: