Stunningly Long Absence!!

Sorry to have been away so long from posting, I've been bogged down in work. I just finished a stint of 12 hour days (plus 2 hours of commuting) in the costume department for TR2N. I am now happily ensconced once again in the Art Department (shorter hours, 5 minutes from home... Ahhh...) so hopefully I'll have a chance to post more frequently again!

So here are a couple of things to whet your appetite... A pair of key frames from an early pass by Jon Favreau at bringing John Carter of Mars to the screen.



The first is a shot of John discovering the incubator (read the books if you don't know what that is.) I conceived of it as being a pit covered with Thoat skins covered in sand. This would have blown off, revealing the incubator to John. The skins were to quickly give him something to cover himself with since there was no way we were going to get away with him running around naked all movie like in the books.


The second is just a beauty shot of the Martian landscape with John and his best buddy on Thoatback. I liked the idea of there being a lot of obsidian-like fused-glass formations, which leads to their architecture, which I had envisioned as being sculpted like a sand-castle and then "fused" into glass with some kind of heat projector (8th ray? 7th?)

Anyway, more to come when I can get a moment to crop them to web size.

Spidey 3

Here are a few keyframes I did for Spidey 3 a few years back. I joined the embattled project pretty late in the game, right after the production design regime change from Neil Spisak to Mike Riva a few weeks into principle photography. We were only a few weeks out from shooting the final battle scene and they had already started building a full-sized set of the first few stories of a skyscraper under construction. Unfortunately the actual scene to take place in the set hadn't been written yet.

I was brought in initially to visualize some of the action and also to design how the same set could be dressed to represent several different levels of the building under construction.

I've never been on a movie where the script changed so radically so often. I wouldn't be half-way through a keyframe when someone would look over my shoulder and say "Oh. Didn't you know? It's no longer Venom in that scene, it's Goblin..." This is why we paint in layers...
It was also pretty political with the change-over in art department. Jim Carson and I kept getting asked to do pretty much the same work, which was really demoralizing, particularly for him since he'd been on the project for over a year already doing great work. I felt really bad, it just wasn't a fun environment. The construction site set ended up being struck and rebuilt twice more for re-shoots. Ahh, this is how movies are made these days. And we wonder why they're so expensive... Anyway, on to the art...


The construction site, ground level. The illustration was painted over a photo of a foamcore & plastic maquette by Brent Phillips of the basic structure. I had to make this in an infuriating number of layers so that elements could be removed and added to dress the other levels. The other versions are even more boring than this though, as they consist of even more removed.


The big battle with Sandman. This version is based on the character design by EJ Krisor, but really doesn't do his awesome version justice. This shot owes a lot to Jim Carson's previous version which you can see on his site HERE.


Spidey swinging to the rescue, back when it was Gwen Stacey in her sports car, not MJ in a taxi.


And speak of the devil...


I can't even remember which way this went in the final film. I think it was venom coming out of the shadows and not goblin, but I can't be sure, since I painted it both ways.


This ended up pretty verbatim in the movie, which I was pleased about. Really saccharine colors, but fun to paint, since it was all freehand and not bogged down in a thousand layers of photo-manipulation!

Tripwire Magazine interview

I was recently interviewed for the 2008 Tripwire Annual, a yearly compendium of genre articles and news out of the UK. Worth picking up if you're on the other side of the pond. It's one of those rare articles where they don't try to tell their own story by paraphrasing you beyond recognition, so kudos to Joel Meddows & his crew.

Also features a gorgeous 2-page Dr. Who spread by my buddy Jeff Carlysle & some really sweet storyboards by an english board artist named Martin Asbury who I'm ashamed to admit I'd never heard of.

So pick it up and support good entertainment journalism!

Oh, the Iron Man stuff keeps coming...

I was planning on holding this stuff back until the "Art of Iron Man" book came out (come on, you want there to be some surprises!) but it looks like thanks to the internet once again the cat's out of the bag. A bunch of stuff got posted to Yahoo Movies, including these three images I did at the very end of production as alternate suit designs that would have been in a "Hall of Armor" coda at the end of the film.



This first one is a concept for War Machine. I spent a lot of time on developing this suit, which was of course cut from the script about half way through pre-production. Originally it was going to be called the MK IV armor and would have been weaponized swap-out parts that would be worn over the original MK III armor. Earlier versions were red and gold, and would have been worn by Tony Stark in the final battle sequence.

And for those of you speculating, sorry folks, as far as I know, if there is a War Machine in IM 2, it's unlikely to be this one. You'll just have to wait and see!


This next one is an attempt at suggesting "stealth" technology in the surface treatment of the suit. This was an idea that was played with early on in the MK 3 development, but was ultimately abandoned as not being classic enough. I revived and updated it for this special purpose suit.


This last one has a funny history. Throughout pre-production, every time we would present our designs for the suit, Avi Arad, the film's producer, would ask us for an underwater suit. Now I should mention that there was never an underwater scene in the script, but as the toy licencing is such a large part of the revenue from these films, there was a lot of pressure to use as many variations on the suit as possible in the film, all budgetary condsiderations notwithstanding. Needless to say, the underwater suit never saw the light of day, but in homage to Avi, I drew this one up as a possible addition to the hall of armor.

Reset Generation Launched...

Ugh! Sorry it's been so long since the last post, I've just been slammed with work and daddyhood, and I'm a terrible multi-tasker!

A cel phone game I contributed a character to just launched for the Nokia NGAGE platform. Free to play online, so check it out at www.resetgeneration.com. They've been trying to market us as "celebrity designers" (yeah right!!!) so have a laugh at my profile here.

I designed the Monster Trainer character (supposed to be a riff on Pokemon.) Kind of a departure for me, they don't usually let me out of my tech cage to do cartoony work, so it was pretty fun to stretch those muscles. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, they stayed pretty faithful to the design.

Below is the original design, along with a couple of development sketches.

Iron Man suit early development

The suit design process involved a lot of ideation before settling down and refining the final Mk3 design. Below are some of the sketches from that exploration. This was kind of a shotgun approach, trying out a lot of different aesthetics and rendering techniques.


This first one was an attempt to try to update the color breakup of the original red and gold suit. This one is a lot more of a bruiser than the final production model, and I was exploring some form ideas to try to give the impression of solidity to the sheet metal, shearing off organic forms to create flat surfaces defined by strong edges. This was an approach that we ended up adapting to the final design in areas like the forearms & legs.


The next one came from the concept of "wearable ordinance" as an alternative to the more streamlined "wearable aircraft" approach that had emerged from Adi's original sketch. I referenced modern tank ablative armor, as well as medieval and roman armor. It had an interesting aesthetic, but ultimately wasn't iconic enough.



This was an attempt at a more modular and organic approach, that would have used Electroactive Polymer Actuators (real-life artificial muscles that are being developed by JPL and NASA, using plastics that contract or expand when current is run through them.) Jon noted that the audience expectation would be more mechanical, with miniaturized pistons, actuators & servos to connect with the metaphor of Iron Man. I think he went in the right direction.


A more streamlined and athletic approach that tried for thicker overlaps between plates. Jon felt that this was too much of a "swimmer's body", rather than the more powerful boxer's build he was looking for. As I think we all expected from the beginning, an evolution of Adi's wearable airplane design was ultimately the way to go.

I also spent a lot of time in this phase working on a Mk 4 suit which would be a militarized version (can you say War Machine, anyone?) that was ultimately cut from the script. With any luck it will turn up in the sequel!

John Berkey

It seems to be a dark time for my childhood heroes. I only discovered in my latest Cinefex that one of my absolute favorite artists has also passed on. John Berkey was one of the greats, with an unmatched fluidity and effortless-looking style. I first discovered Berkey's work with the unforgettable poster for Star Wars, and the fold-up epic battle poster that came with the first album I ever bought with my own money, the Star Wars Soundtrack. I remember being outraged in the way only a nerdy kid can, at how there were multiple Millenium Falcons in the piece, and how the TIE Fighter's solar panels were square, rather than hexagonal.

As I began to become an artist in my own right, Berkey's masterful ability to denote solid form in the fewest, seemingly effortless brushstrokes became a goal that to this day I despair of ever reaching. It was always a delight to discover his visions of space and technology hiding in the pages of Popular Science or Road and Track, and I would find myself picking up softcover SF books from authors I didn't even read, as the Berkey covers promised wonderous adventure that the text could rarely live up to. There was an optimism to his visions of titanic, streamlined spacecraft tracing rainbow contrails through the firmament that evoked a heady time of exploration and discovery that we seem to have lost in this period of cynicism and apathy toward space.

A prolific artist, he left us a wealth of pieces to continue to inspire us, and in recent years two collections of his work were published, something I could only have dreamed of as a child. Hopefully his work can keep inspiring new generations for years to come.