This sketchbook was made while I was a student at USC Animation. It is dated 2002. There are a lot of figure drawings and surfing doodles in it which is very fitting since that is all I really did back then. It is a notable book as it was in this sketchbook that I first started to develop my own style.
I really should have a lot more work to show for this project. It has lived in my head for years. I really love it. I’ll leave the story for a future post but expect me to write a good deal about it in the future. Its my baby and I love it. Out side of friends and family this is the first time I have put any of it up for others to see.
Dragon is the story of a poor street sweeper in an ancient Himalayan city who sets out to clean up his city and in doing so uncovers more dirt than he was expecting. Our humble young hero is pulled into a world divided by greed. As an army of wild mountain bandits threatens to invade the isolated city its people see little hope for survival but to pray desperately to their dragon god for protection. From the grit of the gutter to the lavishness of the city’s palace our street sweeper must use all of his sweeping skills to uncover the truth about the dragon and find a way to save the city he loves before time runs out and all is lost.
The project is based upon the book “Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like” BY J. Williams. Vanguard had the rights to the books and paid me to write it with a writing partner, Sejung Kim. The project has sat on the shelf for years. It’s a beautiful story and I would love to see it get its due some day. In my free time I have donated a ton of time and artwork for the project hoping it would help grease the wheels and get it moving. Every now and then I get a phone call and then the excitement fades and its back on the shelf again.
Above is a pitch trailer I made for the project and below are the panels I used to make it. Interestingly enough I drew all of this while I was in Jerusalem.
There was a time when Space Chimps was being tossed about as a possible musical. This was one of the sequences I was asked to make while exploring that idea. Somewhere I have the animatic for this sequence. I will post it when I find it.
This is a lost space chimps one scene. The greasy salesman character, I believe his name was spyro gyro or something like that, was cut and with him these boards. The set up to this was that NASA was getting its budget cut and they needed to sell to Feds a new mission, Ham was the unwilling pawn that would get the agency the money it needed. He had just been seized and dragged from the circus in the earlier… Read more »
Comet returns to earth and Huston catches our falling star.
These are the roughs for the big jetpack chase scene at the end of the Space Chimps 2. It’s particularly memorable because my wife went into labour while I was working on it. This is also why it is incomplete.
In this scene from Space Chimps 2. Comet has taken off in a rocket and the rest of the gang tries to find him.
In this scene Dick and Don, two american tourist, have just escaped from prison, and discovered to their surprise that they are in London. They have been framed and they need to find out why and by whom. Being handcuffed at the ankle though is going to make the search difficult.
Boomerang Girl is a film idea I was playing with a few months ago. The basic idea was to do something really fun, so I mixed together a bunch of my favorite things and wrapped a story around it. Here are a few panels.
