Interview Quote:
Storyboards and key art along with color scripts are among the tools used to chart tonal perceptions of food, which can vary from disgusting to delicious depending on where and what the characters eat.
"The color supervisor looks at everything universally and makes sure all the color is working well with one another," Bian explains. "With a hot dog example, it depends on not just the hot dog's natural color, but its color within the lighting of the scene. A hot dog in one room is gonna look different than a hot dog under the sunlight. The supervisor will adjust the color of it per scene so that it lives correctly in its environment."
"For the alien food, the paladins look at it and are often disgusted by it, so visually we knew it needed to be kind of gross looking to humans," Bian continues. "During the [early] phase of design, some of the original concepts that we had involved a lot of tubes and coils. Sacks — drooping off bowls — is another shape."
While making food look figuratively and literally "alien" can involve a lot of playing with shapes, making it look tasty requires a simple, widely used animation trick: specular highlights.
"It's like a secret ingredient," Bian teased. "Specular highlights make any food look good. Taking the hot dog, if it's just a drawing that's oblong in shape and a purplish-pink color, it's not exactly the most appetizing. But add a couple of little shiny spots on it, and suddenly it's looking like a grilled hot dog. Or with a muffin, when you're looking at it under the light, and it's catching a little bit — we make it glisten."
Christine Bian talks about designing the appealing (and unappealing) alien food of Voltron
