SARAH SCHRECK
FilmQuestion Background Art
Ongoing | Illustration & Motion Design
Every video essay is a chance to emulate the style of a different IP!
The Brief
I was approached by Christopher Bingham, a London-based YouTuber, to create a realistic book cover (for an April Fool's joke about Dreamworks' Antz and Pixar's A Bug's Life being based on the same fabricated source material). The collaboration went well enough that he brought me on as an artist for backgrounds in his ongoing video essay series!
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With multiple multi-million-view videos, the pressure was on, and the excitement was high. Who DOESN'T want to create art that mimics famous movies and television?
The Idea
Our first film was the Nightmare Before Christmas, with six videos coming out over the autumn and winter holidays of 2025. With that many videos, I wanted to keep switching it up for each background. We selected the iconic hill location, Christmastown, and the woods.
The Plan
Each background would feature subtle parallax across a few minutes' time. (For this iteration, I worked in Premiere Pro, but have since shifted to a workflow involving AfterEffects, with exciting results!)
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Each setting had to feel like the style of Tim Burton, while being subdued enough to be a background. As excited as I was, I wasn't going to steal the show!
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I couldn't help myself, however, and used Procreate Dreams to animate two special appearances of Oogie Boogie masked onto the moon. Here's the isolated animation!
The Problem
So far, the biggest challenge has been making sure I've seen all the movies we're working on! And that's a great problem to have. (But I'll keep this project up-to-date if I begin to face more challenges.)
The Product
Stay tuned for more and more! As of the last update of this page, FilmQuestion has released the Nightmare Before Christmas series, a one-off essay about Local Hero, and a Star Was series. But there's more on the way! I think I'll even need to break out Blender for one of them...