The King and I
Below is a small sample of some of the character designs that I explored for the King in the movie Space Chimps.
Ambient Cinema “ Stillborn”
A few years ago I was really excited about ambient cinema. Making films for the purpose of creating atmosphere. Stillborn was one of my big project from that time. It was an ongoing abstract piece that I showed a lot at gallery shows and IDM parties in the Underground LA art scene. It was always fun to project this piece really big and watch people throughout the night get lost in it.
The film is a loop so it has no specific starting point.
Back Again Boards
Space Chimps storyboards. Leaving Malgor and through the wormhole.
Danced4
An animated motion dance inspired my some of Oskar Fischinger’s early work. I animated this while on the plane down to California on my laptop using TVPaint.
I was “AD”dicted
Whenever there was a little time to kill I often found myself working on some sort of ad. To be honest I had a lot of fun thinking up funny slogans and commercials. The following films were made towards the end of production, after I had lost my place in both the art and the story department and for the most part was sitting around the office killing time, waiting for my contract to expire. It was a last ditch effort on my part to try and contribute something to the film. It didn’t go anywhere but I had a lot of fun making them and I hope you enjoy them as well.
My pitch for the add campain was to show the main character ham in a series of very bad nasa system test videos where everything goes wrong. To our delight pour ham gets put through the ringer.
Jetpack Testing
Space Suit Testing
Bladder Testing
Here are the original thumbnails as well.
- for a good long time the ending to my Wakefield project featured a flying house then “UP” came out and it was back to the drawing board
- The gold capped dragon temple
- color key concepts
- Planet plants
- an alien town
- Space Chimps Color Keys
- Han sweeping the city gate
- finding paradise
- frog on the widow sill
- red rover, red rover let alien king come over
- the mountain bandit looking down on the city of Wu
- Han, the pour little street sweeper.
- an ice city
- zoo animals, Mindanao wrinkled hornbill
- the king and his puppets
- the bad guys
- nude digital study
- murder in the banana plants
- mountains photoshop painting
- Woke up one morning to find a rock in the car window.
- A wire and sculpey tree
- The old man “Dragon” from my Dragon project
- Easter Sunday drawing with Daisy Church at the Huntington Gardens
- I showed up with my camera for a friends art show at USC.
- floating body study
- By brother Todd was in a Surf contest so I walked the beach at Morro Strands with my camera and brush
- An old self portrait i made when I was at USC. circa 2001
- a Stillborn calf we found at my family ranch
- From my Califia project, Amazonians on the beach
- one of my first digital paintings
- one of my first digital paintings
- over looking Santa Barbara
- image from my old Bio page
- looking out the upstairs window
- a sickly looking strong man
- whats in this pipe
- Moooving Day. On set with Napolean and Fabrice.
- Fabrice and I on set during the making of Vagabonding. You got to love the shopping cart dolly!
- Daisy and I building a table for the USC Animation Patio
- Jeannie Kim lending a hand
- nearly done
- Silas at Snoopy World in Hong Kong
- My parents newly landscaped back yard.
- me on a mini bike
- blue whisps
- looks faded
- trying out expressions in zbrush
- buzby about to lose it
- tweet placeholder
- pumpkin farm
- The trailer
- painted on the canvas cover of my drawing bag
- Filming on the family farm. That barn would soon get torn down to be our winery.
- Film nerds
- The gold capped dragon temple
- Mark Decter
- My Wife and I on graduation day
- Marc Deckter rocking the super8mm camera out in Joshua Tree
- Brian Coffee
- Tom Sito and USC animation class at the WB
- Daisy Church
- thats me back in the day
- The palace of Fine Arts
- View from my Hong Kong Art studio, over looking Ma on Shan
- New scanner
- gold
- warrior
- storyboard exploration
- story notes
- preparing for war
- dreamland notes
- exploring Kalifia
- nude girl
- Hermosa Beach, costa rica
- guy
- island dream
- prisoner
- banana sidewalk
- pets
- random aliens
- alien park
- japan trip
- old memmories
- going for a walk
- in China
- surfing guy
- messy
- early space chimp doodles
- monkey
- tree branch
- girl and weirdness
- heros
- surfing drawing
- the glass pipe
- spray
- parent trap cartoon
- all over the place
- puppets
- first thoughts
- drawing in his sketchbook
- water
- early Aiya
- the man
- the man
- dog house
- Sterling Sheehy
- A great site
- My new sketchbook
- Ezra and Maul search for answers by merging Jedi and sith holocrons
- Super hero school bad guy round up
- Fleet week beach day
- Rudie drawing a map of the United States
- plugged in and ready to go
- Half way
- Let’s draw!
- Welcome to the Art Archive
- This is not a hat
- This is not a hat
- light through the leaves
- As far as I got before they dragged me off the mountain
- looking West towards Mt. Tam
- my POV
- water-based oil on panel, 8x10in
- 8x10in oil on canvased board
- oil on panel, 8x10in
- 9x12in Oil on panel
- oil on canvas panel 8x10in
- 9x12in oil on board
- Painters view
- Oil on canvas 12x16in
- Singularity from Nano Labs
- 9x12in oil on panel
- 3ft x 4ft oil on canvas
- oil on panel 9x11inch
- 9x11in Oil on Panel
- Artist’s view
- 9x11in oil on panel
- 9x12in oil on panel
- 9x12in oil on panel
- 9x12in Oil on Linen Panel
- 9x12in Oil on linen panel
- Artist’sView
- Rest in peace Twitter
- Artist View
- field trip
- 9x12in oil on linen
- POV
think these next three clips may give some insight into the sort of film I had running around my head in the early days. They are really really old, slopy, and fun. We used clips like these to help sell the film to investors before the film was defined and everything was still on the table. I still love the energy. Thanks to Devin Westberg for doing the voices!
Yummy’s
This is way better than space food
Coke
Space Chimps the Musical!?!
THE WORST CIRCUS IN THE WORLD- Everyone else at the time kept drawing very traditional circus’ but for me I kept thinking about the little half ring circus that used to run every year at fairground near my house. The Swan Bros Circus. I was in 4H and had seen their act every year my entire childhood. The Swan Bos. were both awesome and terrible at the same time. John Williams always called this the Napolean Dynamite version of the Space chimp opening but for me it will always be the Swan Bros. version. I thought the drab setting would could provide contast to the hyper-saturation of the second act and at the very least be a nice brake from the all too common opening musical number.
The following two animatics are what got me the storyboarding gig on space chimps. Both were made before there was a director or any set stylistic or visual direction for the film.
THIS WAS A SUPER ROUGH FIRST PASS
Keith graves had made this little number and I was asked to do some boards for it. At the time the idea of a musical was still on the table. Here is what I came up with.
ONCE AGAIN SUPER ROUGH DRAFT STUFF HERE
After this I was asked to attempt another pass using Jungle Boogie.
Draw faster
We just started drawing… In the beginning I rushed in and overdrew everything.
Lost in Space Chimps
One of the downsides to being a writer or a concept artist is that no one ever gets to see your work. If you’re lucky it will navigate its way to the screen, but chances are it will never see the light of day.