Animation Source Forums

I remember this scene. Yes, that's just stunning

I missed this in your previous message and yes that is definitely it! The scene is when Balto has Boris in his mouth on the roof top and looks over momentarily to see Steele's team approaching Nome. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction

Acanis, I hope in the future we'll find more interesting materials, for example today (Steele's real fate). And, maybe I'll find more, what I wanted to find (Simon Wells answered on my question). For example, when Steele and his dogs are bulling Balto, or when Balto helps Jenna to learn about Rosy (he tells about his paws very neutrally). Storyboards are stunning.

Here's another interesting original background from my personal collection:



It is from the sequence where Balto is leading the team home only to be confused by Steele's marks on the trees. The scene here last for only a few seconds and again the level of detail and work is quite stunning. You'll notice that this piece comes with a "test cel" over lay that shows the direction of travel for the team.

However this piece was not complete and I managed to track down the foreground hand painted onto a cel.... there were many cels created for Balto and that is how you see the "3D" effect with characters behind scenery etc....

So here is the complete scene with the cel over lay which I might have got round the wrong way but hey

I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this topic but here are a couple more original backgrounds from the dog race scene and they follow immediately after each other. The first is another multi-layered piece but this time the foreground is painted on paper and all of the gaps are cut out. The buildings in the background are the base layer and the boats, barrels and snow line are foreground. That is how the studio achieved a lot of the "3D" views and were able to animate the dogs etc running behind obstacles. The nice part about this set is that it came complete with a 3 frame hand drawn test cel of Balto running between the boats.. it must have been created early on as you'll notice that it is Balto's original character design.



Here is a close up of some of the detail and join between the two layers



The second background is a panoramic one which allows the camera to sweep across and give a real feel of perspective. As Balto runs out from the boats, he ducks under the timbers before scaling the last boat to jump over the gap in the next frame.



And another close up for some of the detail



Both backgrounds are painted by Ray Rankin and both are quite wide. I had to take about 3 separate photos of each and stitch them together so you can see the completed image. This does take some time and effort and I only do it for fans to enjoy so it is always appreciate should you wish to comment.