ELMO THE MUSICAL _ Concept Art 01

I have a confession to make... I never liked Elmo. I was too old for him when he became a regular and then star of Sesame Street and saw him as a juvenile pretender to the Grover throne. I was so wrong.

For the last year, I've had the privilege of working as Art Director at Magnetic Dreams Studio on a number of Sesame projects, the centerpiece of which is the launch of a new interactive segment featuring Elmo's imaginary Broadway Show, appropriately titled ELMO THE MUSICAL. Shot in front of blue screen, it's our job to create the entirely computer generated environment of Elmo's direction. I'll go into detail about the process in future posts but just want to say here what an honor it's been teaming with an animation studio and Sesame crew working at the top of their game.

With his great humanity and innovation, Jim Henson was my artistic idol growing up. With the Muppets, Jim and co. created what amounts to another living, breathing, sentient species for us to share the planet with. Now I can say how fulfilling it is working with Muppeteers Kevin Clash and Rickey Boyd as they bring as much wit, talent, and attention to detail to their work. I've been immersed in Elmo and I am in awe of the subtlety, humor, and, most of all, heart, that Kevin imbues in his creation. I now love the little guy and it's my great pleasure to help create a world for him to play and learn in.

ELMO THE MUSICAL premieres with this 43rd season of Sesame Street on Monday, September 24th 2012.

BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Here's a great short "making of" documentary that includes the show opening and gives you a great idea of all the work that's gone into it.

LOGO DESIGN

My various logo concepts for the show, Sesame went with the one on the top left that Magnetic was already in the process of developing when I came on.

GUACAMOLE THE MUSICAL - Concept Art

The premiere episode is "Guacamole the Musical" in which Elmo is an explorer chef (think Indiana Jones in a chef's hat) in search of a legendary Guac recipe. Below are my style frames for the "Nacho Picchu" and "The Temple of Spoons" locations, followed by their fully composited CG models.

NACHO PICCHU

THE TEMPLE OF SPOONS

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.

ELMO'S ALPHABET CHALLENGE _ Concept and Background Art

Growing up, no other work of art made more of an impression on me than The Muppets in all of their incarnations and Jim Henson has always been an idol of mine for the imagination, wit, and compassion he brought to his work. With that in mind, I've been very fortunate this past year to hook up with Mike Halsey and Don Culwell's MAGNETIC DREAMS Animation Studio in Nashville to work as Art Director on a number of Sesame Street-related projects. Not the first I worked on but the first out of the gate, the direct-to-DVD movie ELMO'S ALPHABET CHALLENGE was released this week.

Directed by John Hamm (not to be confused with the slightly less debonaire Mad Man) and with creative direction and character design by Rickey Boyd (a Muppeteer in his alter ego) ELMO'S ALPHABET CHALLENGE applied Sesame's classic sense of parody to a number of familiar video games as Elmo, Abby, and Telly are sucked into the game to battle an impy elf through the entire alphabet. All said, it was a feat to assemble what were essentially several mini-movies in totally different styles, each with their own set of challenges. After about 2 years of working out of my home studio, it's been rewarding to work in studio with such an incredibly talented bunch and I always get a thrill seeing everyone improve a work across the production pipeline.

As Art Director, I did a good deal of the concept art and on-air background art for the project that I can give some insight into the different segments here (click on art thumbnails to enlarge them). EAC was a huge team effort and I'll be shouting out other artists as I go. You can also learn more about the whole team, complete with head shots, HERE.

HAPPY WORDS

Confession: I had never even played Angry Birds before illustrating this parody background. With two lost days of addictive "research" I tried to cook up something that didn't look like any of the seemingly infinite number of game environments. The BG is designed to account for levels of atmosphere for the objects to fly past and to also allow for parallax between the layers of tropical foliage. This one was animated in Flash by John Hill.

Here's a preview:

JUST DANCE Parody

This scene is a cel-shaded spoof on Just Dance with motion capture choreography at the core of the animation (animator Andrew Lee Atteberry needed to play down his slick moves in his role as A.B.C-More). For this one, I proposed a number of backgrounds and ran some test animation of the lights to the music in After Effects. "Q, Q, Q!" The soundtrack rang in our heads for weeks. On these Sesame gigs, I try to sneak in nods to classic Sesame shorts when possible. Hard to tell because we went monochromatic here in order to pop the characters, but, can you place the homage that the background pattern is referring to? 

SUPER MUSTACHIO BROS.

A comp of 2D Photoshop assets in a 3D environment that's meant to evoke the art direction of the Super Mario world. We transition from the more fantasy pastoral landscape to industrial as the tension mounts. The real treat was being able to lay out the modular assets in side scrolling maps of the scene like those form the old Nintendo Power magazines. Long-time Nickelodeon co-hort Astrid Riemer was also an asset builder on this one.

Here's a preview:

PAC MAN Parody

Somehow this little bugger with all of its pixel specificity proved trickier to work out than some of the others but Elmo's "Muncha-Muncha!" line delivery was particularly cute. Astrid made the changes to the multiple levels. To the kids watching, I'm sure this looks as archaic as hieroglyphics. Jason Parish designed the pixel art objects.

GUITAR HERO Parody

This is a collage mock-up of the stage, guitar neck, and other elements for the Guitar Hero parody that I constructed and lit in Photoshop. I'd say this is an example of a scene where our compositing team went above and beyond in terms of fleshing out the shots with their own lighting and atmosphere. Jason Parish designed the alphabet icons.

WORLD OF ELFCRAFT

I can't seem to locate my Photoshop collage/painted style frame for this one but, trust me, it was awesome. Below is a detail of the back plate I did for the CG environment that was modeled by Brad Applebaum (who, along with Craig Simpson and Jamie Coakley Jr., was also responsible for the design of the MARIO KART parody). I particularly enjoy this scene for the work of animators Abdel Pizarro and Matt Egler who I also got to share Qdoba and a cubicle bay with during the project.

 

Here's a preview (Spoiler Alert - it's for the letter "Z," the end of the alphabet and climax to the Challenge):

FEEDING GROUND _ The Movie...

Haven't been able to post in a little while but I'd be remiss not to share some news here. I started this site as a way to offer up some lessons I was learning as a novice illustrating my first graphic novel-length comic, FEEDING GROUND. I've shared posts on comic classes and pitching. On page layouts, logos, covers, coloring, and book design. About a year ago I was contacted by Jason Carpenter, an employee of Hollywood producer Ed Pressman, through this very blog. And, a few weeks ago, it was finally announced on the Hollywood Reporter that FEEDING GROUND has been optioned as a movie by PRESSMAN FILM.


Ed's a visionary who has produced a wide range of classics from WALL STREET to AMERICAN PSYCHO, other comic adaptations like CONAN and THE CROW, and exotic animals like The Talking Heads' TRUE STORIES. Here's what he has to say about FEEDING GROUND:


“Feeding Ground is an intense and terrifying thriller with a subtle but pointed commentary on immigration in modern America,” said Pressman. “The graphic novel is so cinematic in nature — as soon as I read it, I knew we could make a film that would resonate with a wide audience.”


Ed also recently gave an interview with Comic Book Resources here. Stephen Christy, the most handsome man in comics, has been soft love shepherding this into existence on the Archaia end.


We're fortunate to be in this position and I'm proud of my collaboration with Swifty Lang and Chris Mangun, the process as much, if not more than, the product. You can read Swifty's account at comicbook.com.


So, what does this mean? Nothing's guaranteed but we've already received the first treatment by screenwriter Carlos Coto (NIKITA, 24). I wasn't expecting the rush of reading our characters as existing outside of our heads and alive in someone else's hands. Carlos has already unearthed and boiled down the essential narrative and greater myth of FEEDING GROUND, and, if our fortune continues, we'll be seeing the tale directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (AMERICAN HORROR STORY).


Thanks for your support and, hopefully, more news to come...

COMIC EVENTS _ Nashville Public Library Lecture

This Saturday, May 12th, I'll be co-delivering a lecture at the Nashville Public Library with fellow Archaia creator Janet K. Lee that traces the history of comics, aka "sequential art," alongside the development of the artform. The lecture is also a pre-cursor to a weekly summer workshop we'll be teaching for aspiring comic creators ages 12-18. More information below.

For the poster, we decided to map a general comic history across six panels and staged in front of the library itself. Below are closer shots of my contributions. (I think Janet completely embodied McCay's art in her Little Nemo panel)

DESIGN _ Fake Criterion Covers

The Criterion Collection is known not only for their deep and lovingly restored film library but also for elevating the level of design with their DVD covers. Forgoing close-up photos of movie stars, the Criterion aesthetic instead incorporates illustration, typography, and/or unique film stills. Design as story. Check the 2011 portfolio by real deal Criterion designer and art director Eric Skillman to see what I mean.

Just for fun, I mocked up some Criterion covers of my own a little while back as part of a message board challenge "Design a Criterion Cover for a Non-Criterion Film." Some examples below:

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Art: A photocopy from an art book on Robert Longo's famous "Men in the Cities" series

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

Art: A "smiling" bust of Griffin Dunne's decomposing character, Jack

BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Art: My Illustration

POPEYE (1980)

Art: Top, an EC Segar "Popeye" comic strip. Bottom, movie Colorforms that were licensed with the actors' likenesses.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Art: Production painting and title treatment from the "making of" book

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Art: Production design of the relief on the side of the Ark of the Covenant

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

Art: A digital collage I did in the spirit of the Surrealism of Polish movie poster art

Side note: only after seeing these together do I see that I must have been going through a "yellow" period

LOGO DESIGN _ "Mind the Gap" Roughs

I recently had the chance to design the logo for Image Comics' preternatural thriller MIND THE GAP, in stores on Wednesday, May 2nd. Here's a Robot 6 interview with writer Jim McCann about the series and I shared the final logo design on my blog here. Thought it might be cool to go through the options that led us there.

During an extremely productive brainstorming call with Jim, we developed some governing principals and descriptive adjectives of a design that would communicate the story and compliment the art by artist Rodin Esquejo and colorist Sonia Oback. We arrived at three potential directions to take.

They were:

ETHEREAL

The story focuses on a woman, Elle, who is caught in the gap between life and death after an attempt on her life. Jim felt that the logo should use color to have an out-of-focus, shifting, ethereal quality to reflect the mental state. The blurring also suggests the movement of a train, recalling the platform on which she was shot. 

FRAGMENTED

The details surrounding Elle's shooting are a mystery and she is working to piece together the clues to identify her shooter and return to the land of the living. As such, I wanted to use utilitarian stencils, like those of subway notices, to create a logo like puzzle pieces that might take a moment to assemble at first glance.

WORLD-WORN

As a pulpy thriller, we also thought to try something that pulled directly from the grit of subway signage, literally the edge of the platform and figuratively at the edge of Elle's consciousness.

BUT

Although these were the three options we discussed, working on the mock-ups compelled me to try a fourth riskier approach that I internally labelled simply as "BIG." By blowing up the stencil as large as possible I wanted the gaps, the negative spaces, to be nearly as prominent as the letter forms. Then, by splitting the title on the top and bottom of the cover we were able to frame and compliment Rodin's art in unique manner and provide an inherent gap or pause in its reading.

I threw this option out there as a bonus, and, after some reflection and minor tweaks, it's the one that the MtG creative team ended up choosing.