PASSION ROXX - Sizzle Pitch

What happens when a hair metal band from 1986 is frozen by their hairspray and thawed out in 2019?

PASSION ROXX!

I directed this short pitch for series at Magnetic Dreams but it's very much the baby of creator John Compton, a former front man who lived the life and survived to tell about it (he died twice).

New for us to work on something Not Quite Safe For Work. I literally worked on this alongside projects for Sesame Street and a Christian curriculum but it felt our monitors were forever filled with assless chaps.

Below, some of the amazing and ridiculous artwork that went into making Passion Roxx possible.

It's rare that we already start a project with such strong art from the client. John arrived with two rounds of character designs by his artist friend Michael "Sheik" Tisdale. They already communicated so much about the look of the characters and the energy of the show.

We knew that we'd be animating this in After Effects with a Duik rig, like we did on "One Shot," and we needed to make the characters more animation friendly and, to my eye, cartoony. The guy for the job was Devin Clark, creator of "Ugly Americans." He offered two rounds and I immediately fell for the giant hair, doll-like proportion version of the guys. 

Along with final clean-up by Ashley Malone and what I crafted as an iconic "Scooby Doo" palette for the band, I felt like we arrived at a fun counterbalance to the crude humor and outsized personalities of glam metal.

To my mind, the band was 4 of the 7 Deadly Sins: Taz = Lust, Mike = Sloth, Vic = Pride, Pete = Gluttony. This schema helped me stage and direct the performances going forward.

Here are more designs from Ashley. We discovered that our Producer Randall Saba worked at Tower Records in the 80s and used to ride his Vespa on the Strip. With that in mind, I had to make him the inciting incident for their accident.

     

I also HAVE to share some of Kimberly Cranfield's secondary character designs. They are on screen for too fleeting moments to really show off how good they are.

I'm always grateful for the ways that board artists and animators plus up a shot and this was a spot of excess where I largely felt it was best to just keep saying "yes" and see what hits. Board artist John Fountain started us off right with a little gag of a coughing seagull that I think set the scene and tone of what's to come.

        

We all knew it was a shame when Magnetic animator and board artist Ben Fosselman recently moved to LA because he would have been perfect for the project. Luckily we got him for a few scenes that brought enough of the Ben we needed.

And, here's the finished shot by Ashley Malone and myself.

So many other key contributions from Tyler Goll on Edit (and utility on just about everything else), John Hill on EFX, and Abdel Pizarro on Comp.

I also wanted to shout out getting to work again with Keith Conroy. He headed up the Background department when I was at Ninja Turtles and he's always made a crazy amount of detail look easy. Below, some of his designs with color by me and Ashley Malone.

SESAME STREET _ The Count's Castle

Concept Art

A little while ago, I had the tremendous opportunity to design the exterior to the Count's Castle for Sesame Street as Art Director at Magnetic Dreams Studio.

I based it on a number of his previous castles (on-air sets, book illustrations, theme park attractions) and situated it in the middle of a park, a la Belvedere Castle in Central Park.

Overhead Reference

It's finally seeing the light of day in this Sesame Street: Trick or Treat DVD and you can see it in action in the promo here:

Here are some details of the model by Stephanie Miranda Goldstein and Brad Applebaum:

A look at the full model:

And, a comparison of the final lighting and rendering by Don Culwell and compositing by Rhea Borzak:

DOING IT TO COUNTRY SONGS - Backstage

For about two weeks of my life, I was consumed by a country song. Specifically, DOING IT TO COUNTRY SONGS by Blake Shelton & The Oak Ridge Boys.

Magnetic Dreams producer Jeff Galle pitched the concept of Blake and the Oaks as country critters living and loving around a local watering hole, Lake Shelton. When we landed the job, one of the few notes we got was that Blake needed to be a deer. Blake Shelton loves deer, he thanks them on every album. And, although it’s no easy task to caricature someone as a deer, Blake Buck was born.

an earlier more graphic version of Blake

final version of Blake

I’m grateful for the opportunity to shepherd this project on an incredibly tight turnaround at the service of country royalty, a devoted fanbase, and this cheeky barroom tune. I did a little bit of everything on the spot, from creating the narrative and look and Blake to peppering the place with easter eggs, but the real thrill was to captain an A-Team of talent in getting it done. Thanks to Mike Halsey and Don Culwell for bringing us all together.

Full credits and links below along with my favorite contribution from each artist.

Character Designer

Rickey Boyd - Fun fact: Rickey once designed animatronic animal versions of the Oak Ridge Boys for a proposed theme restaurant, but that’s a story for him to tell. Here, Rickey designed most of the characters, immediately capturing the Oaks but also lending a sultry charm to our lady skunk that I didn’t know he had in him.

an unused version of William by Ben Fosselman

Designers

Trea Bailey - My right hand on the project, Trea did finishes on characters and especially made his mark on the crowd and his final version of Ol’ Red the bartender.

Ashley Malone - That moose! The utensils on the antlers is a sight gag that still makes me nod when I see it.

Kimberly Cranfield - She owned the raccoon, in all his underlit glory.

detail of the exterior BG - I wanted to show off Joe's boats!

Background Designers

Joe Spadaford - I knew I needed a background designer/ painter who could own the exterior. Joe created a centerpiece for our video, even though he had never worked in the style before.

Amanda Wood - Mandi painted all of those Bill Wray-inspired detailed DOING IT stills. In the thick of things, when I received her painting of the buckle, I knew we had our key art and the heart of the piece.

Michael Lapinski - hey, that’s me. I was just pleasantly surprised they let me ride with the John Hubley meets country-fried Samurai Jack style I cooked up.

Animators

Kimberly Cranfield - Kim and Ashley pulled double duty on this. All-Stars, both. Kim really brought the raccoon to the forefront as the bar’s soul.

Ashley Malone - Although she brought a sly charm to the Oaks, its her spastic chattering of Joe Beaver at the end that never fails to make me smile.

Shin Matsuda - Shin hadn’t done much character animating before but man did he ever nail that smushy slow dance buckle grind.

John Hill - Fire! Once I knew we would have John on the piece I had to have him animate the few EFX we had.

Ben Fosselman - I couldn’t imagine doing this without Ben on it and luckily we got him long enough for some Crow meets Hound romance and Richard Frog’s post-show snack.

Compositing Supervisor

Rhea Borzak - As always, everything flows through Rhea and it wouldn’t get out the door or look nearly as good without her. But, it was her late addition jowel jiggle to Ben’s hound animation that I applaud her for.

Compositors

Shin Matsuda - blazing fast as a compositor but now I want to get him character animating again

Joel Robertson - with more than a few music videos under his belt, Joel livened up our camera and delivered on the red light scene change in middle of the piece.

Thanks team, thanks Blake, thanks Warner Music, thanks Lindsay, and, most of all, thanks to the deer.

SESAME STREET _ House of Bricks & More

HOUSE OF BRICKS

This week saw the premiere of a few more Sesame Street segments with backgrounds and animation produced by Magnetic Dreams Studio. It's always a treat to be able to dive into a classic Sesame parody and marry the aesthetic of the show with that of another pop culture institution, in this case the very adult Netflix series HOUSE OF CARDS. AND, we got to filter it through the tale of the 3 Little Pigs. Marty Robinson's "Frank Underwolf" may be my favorite recent Muppet performance.

You can see the full spot above and here is the original HOUSE OF CARDS opening for reference. Re-creating the time lapse montage was my most enjoyable task for this spot.



The first challenge was to re-imagine the Capitol Building, Supreme Court, and White House as constructed of straw, sticks, and bricks. These are my concept designs, final modeling was done by Stephanie Miranda Goldstein.

But, the real test was for us to destroy them. All three buildings needed to be built and rigged to be blown apart. Our simulator Wenie Rahardja did all of the heavy lifting here, working out the particle dynamics with Stephanie under the guidance of Creative Director, Rickey Boyd. Additional animation by Jamie Coakley. Here's a cool sneak peek at our Capitol Building sim in one of its later stages.

SUPERGROVER 2.0 - "Fruit" and "Underwater Bowling"

This week also featured the return of 2 new segments of Super Grover 2.0.

"Fruit" starred a pineapple painter who allowed me to include some paintings of food-related inside jokes from Sesame's past.

Loaf of bread, container of milk, stick of butter

Operatic Orange

"Underwater Bowling" featured the amusing premise of an Octopus and Shrimp unable to keep their pins from floating away. Brad Applebaum and Ayan Akbar on modeling and Josh Stafford and Judd Eschliman on compositing did a fantastic job capturing the detail, lighting, and spirit of the location.

I shared the above model sheet by Rickey and myself to give a sense of the production process involved in one of these spots. For more on this pipeline, check out the video below. Our production manager John Hamm illustrates what it requires to take a Sesame short from green screen to your screen.

pipeline process from John Hamm on Vimeo.

SESAME KINECT _ Background Design

Today saw the release of SESAME STREET KINECT, an interactive experience for the Xbox and the first project I worked on with Magnetic Dreams studio in Nashville.

Below you can see some of my background designs for segments of the game. The first is a rough Photoshop comp that I created as reference for the 3D modeling team on an Abby short called "Poodle Parlor."

For the following bunch, I actually painted these backgrounds in Photoshop (first time in a while) with a digital brush from the studio that I've fallen in love with. They comprise three environments (a circus, farm, and swamp) from a game in which kids are prompted to throw a Muppet ball at Elmo.