Typically, I like to post my storyboard work on my website, but only
after I know that the ad has already aired and has been made available
on the internet. Sometimes months or even years go by before I see the
finished commercials online. Recently, I got curious, did a search and
found a bunch of commercials that I had worked on that I hadn't noticed
before.
This commercial for Church's Chicken, produced by Independent Media, was part of a series I storyboarded for director Danny Leiner (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle).
Click on the artwork to view larger.
This was a series of four commercials I did a while back with Crossroads Films for Cox. The spots were directed by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog).
This spot was created by Blind's Greg Gunn for the Salt River Project.
For Part 1 of this Commercial Roundup, click here.
Check back at this blog for Part 3 of this Commercial Roundup!.
Typically, I like to post my storyboard work on my website, but only after I know that the ad has already aired and has been made available on the internet. Sometimes months or even years go by before I see the finished commercials online. Recently, I got curious, did a search and found a bunch of commercials that I had worked on that I hadn't noticed before.
Here is a spot I worked on for Independent Media with director Danny Leiner (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle). It was one of a series of spots for AdoptUSKids.org. Click the image for a better view of my storyboards.
Here's another ad that was part of the same series.
Here's another ad I storyboarded for Danny Leiner--this time for Church's Chicken.
Here's a commercial I worked on with SK&G for Baha Mar. Several different ideas were drawn for this pitch, and you can see some of the ideas sprinkled throughout the finished ad.
This commercial, produced by Independent Media for Schick, was a last-minute rush-job call. It was directed by Adam Shankman (Glee). No more all-nighters for me, thank you.
This virtual reality spot for Nike is best viewed on a cell phone that has motion sensing capabilities using the YouTube app (not your browser). From the app, search for "Neymar Jr. Effect" to properly view the spot. While watching the video, you can get an interactive 360 degree view of the action by turning your phone. The original concept for the ad was that you view the clip with the action running backwards, which is why the action is presented in reverse order in the storyboards. The spot was produced by Smuggler and directed by Adam Berg. Thanks to Beth at Action Artists for finding this spot for me.
Here's a Vampirella piece I drew for the Big Wow ComicFest.
The convention will take place from April 18-19 in San Jose. I'll have
a table there, and the original black and white ink artwork of this
will be available for auction.
Here's the final part of the
storyboard panel I participated in for the Society of Illustrators of
Los Angeles along with Le Tang, Justin Ridge and Steve Ahn on May of
2014 at the Victory Theater in Burbank, as moderated by Marion Eisenman,
and captured on video by Santosh Oomen.
In May of 2014, I participated in a panel about storyboarding for the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. The panel took place at the Victory Theater in Burbank and included storyboard artists Le Tang, Justin Ridge, Steve Ahn, and myself. This is the second part of the video, the first part of which you can view here.
For
this illustration, I was inspired by the Christmas song "Santa Baby",
which was originally recorded in 1953 by Eartha Kitt (though the
recording is often misattributed to Marilyn Monroe). The song was
written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer, and was a sexy
tongue-in-cheek novelty song in which a woman flirtatiously asks Santa
for a host of extravagant gifts. The song was a big holiday hit in
1953 and was recorded again with new lyrics (as "This Year's Santa
Baby") in 1954. A more uptempo version of the original was recorded by
Kitt in 1963. It has been covered by artists such as Madonna, Mariah
Carey, Macy Grey, The Pussycat Dolls, Taylor Swift and Miss Piggy.
I drew and painted the illustration digitally in Photoshop. The limited
palette is an homage to the popular two or three-color printing process
that was often used in publications in the early 20th Century.
On May 31 2014, I participated in a panel discussion about storyboarding for the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles at the Victory Theater in Burbank. Here's part 1 of the talk as captured by Santosh Oommen.
Well San Diego Comic-Con 2014 has come and gone. As always, it was a great chance to catch up with some old faces, and meet some new ones. This year, as I've mentioned earlier in my blog (here and here), I submitted four pieces of artwork for inclusion in the Comic-Con Souvenir Book. All four of them were accepted, and three of them were run full page! I had presented abbreviated versions of the art on my blog to maintain the surprise, but now that the book is out, I now present the complete designs for your viewing pleasure (click the image to see it larger):
The fourth image was the Usagi Yojimbo poster I posted earlier on my blog.
As I do every year, I will be tabling at Artists Alley at San Diego Comic-Con. Stop by and visit me at my table DD24 (Artists Alley is close to Hall Entrance G and my table is usually close to an art school that specializes in anatomy). I will have copies of my book, Professional Storyboarding: Rules of Thumb available, as well as several new prints -- Black Widow (pictured above), Daredevil, Human Torch and Submariner, and a digital painting of some robots. I will also have a mini sketchbook of robot thumbnail sketches (pictured below).
I'll have most of my regular items for sale and will be doing sketch commissions. Come on by and say hello! Look for this banner:
Way back in the stone age (the late 1980's), I was out of school and just starting out, looking for some way to break into the big time illustration/cartooning world. I was sharing an old Victorian with four other roommates in downtown Sacramento and working as a graphic designer for a magazine aimed at horse riders and breeders, and freelancing on the side.
One of my roommates, Larry, was also an aspiring cartoonist (we would both end up working in the games industry at LucasArts Entertainment) and in an effort to inspire/motivate ourselves to come up with cartoons, we used to have a little weekly competition: draw up a cartoon and bring it to the local pub (The Rubicon Brewing Company in this case, just around the corner from the house)-- show up empty handed and you buy the drinks. If you both have a cartoon, the waitress chooses the best cartoon, the loser buys.
Here's one of the first cartoons I came up with. I eventually sent it around and was amazed when I got a message relayed to me at work that National Lampoon Magazine wanted to run the cartoon! This was the first time I had done any work that would be seen outside of the local area, with most of my previous work mostly being local Sacramento businesses and ad agencies.
The cartoon editor, Sam Gross, encouraged me to keep drawing cartoons and submitting and I did, but nothing I sent him seemed to have what he was looking for (a couple of these unused strips would later show up in my self-published comic book "Saturday Nite" years later). He said none of the strips I sent had that "something" that this strip had. It took a while for the strip to finally appear in the magazine, but it eventually showed up in the June 1990 issue. The magazine went under a few years later.
I cant believe it! It's been more than a year since it's release, and though I've made mention of it before, I've never made an "official" blog post about the release of my book Professional Storyboarding: Rules of Thumb, published by Focal Press (a leading publisher of instructional manuals dealing with art and technology).
It is co-authored by Sergio Paez, a storyboard artist who has worked on shows like Clone Wars, and runs the online storyboard community StoryboardArt.org . He brings his own perspective to the book with years of experience working and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The book was intended to be a realistic guide to working in the storyboard industry, warts and all. Aside from covering what you'd expect in a storyboard book --like composition and film grammar, the intention was also to address the differences in the many kinds of storyboarding there are, since "storyboarding" is kind of a blanket term that is used to describe several different jobs that serve very different purposes (depending on the audience --which can be anything from an animator in a foreign country to an account executive to a film crew). The book features interviews from working storyboard artists (Benton Jew, Josh Sheppard, Sherm Cohen, Jeff Zugale) to get a no-holds barred look at what working in this industry is really like.
As mentioned before, I'll be part of a panel presented by the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. I'll be bringing along some samples of my work in the form of storyboard-to-film-comparison clips. Here's a taste:
I'll be slowly releasing these videos right here on my blog over the course of several weeks. Keep an eye open!
* * *
It's been a very busy year! Lots of cool projects I've been working on I wish I could tell you about, but one of the things about being a storyboard artist is that you can't always talk about what you're working on until a few years later when the project is done!
Here are two more images I created for the San Diego Comic Con 2014 Souvenir Book. These are cropped, but you can see the full images once the souvenir book is published (I'll post the full images on this blog, whether they're selected for publication in the souvenir book or not).
This is my art submission celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hellboy for Comic Con 2014. This is a cropped version of the art-- the full design (if chosen) will appear in the Comic Con 2014 Souvenir Book.
Sometimes you look at some old artwork you did, and you think back to the clear idea you had intended, and then see the final product you were able to produce at the time. Sometimes the gap
between the two versions can get to you. Such was the case with this piece. So I dug out the old piece
and added a little extra texcha. This is really much closer to what I had in mind when I had originally
done the piece five years ago.
I've been spending a bit of my extra time drawing robot sketches. These were done in preparation for a book project I hope to have ready by Comic Con. More later.
For you comics fans, here's a little drawing I did for for the Stan and Sharon Sakai Benefit Auction. Stan Sakai, the creator of the comic book Usagi Yojimbo, has had some very tough times recently. His wife recently acquired a rare debilitating disease. After an extended stay in the hospital, she is home, but requires 24-hour care. The cost of the care is more than the Sakai's insurance covers, so The Cartoon Art Professional Society is putting on an auction to help raise money to offset some of the Sakai's ongoing medical expenses. Donations can be made here, and the first in a series of benefit auctions will be held beginning March 5 via Ebay under the name "CAPSauction".
I worked on a lot of projects during my time at LucasArts that were announced to the public, but later cancelled or changed before being released. This has generated some interest from some hardcore LucasArts fans in some of these discarded materials. Going through my old files, I recently dug up some old animation I did on some of these games. I put together some of them into a reel, and have included some descriptions of these materials.
1. Herc's Adventures
These are "clean" versions of some of the animation I did for this game. Sometimes you can't always appreciate the animation as well with all the backgrounds, scrolling and activity going on during gameplay. Also--especially with sprite-oriented games, sometimes things can be lost in the translation during processing. These clean versions give you a better look at the original feel of the animation.
By the way, if the flame in the Hades animation looks familiar, it may be because I pretty much used the same animation as when I animated the flames in Ben's motorcycle exhaust in Full Throttle. That in turn may look familiar because I pretty much copied it frame by frame from the flames from the dragon in Disney's Sleeping Beauty!
2. Full Throttle
Here's a clean version of the run cycle used in a cutscene in Full Throttle where Ben tries to escape from a big ball of flame on an airplane (if I'm remembering correctly)
3. Ghoul Patrol
Raw animation from Ghoul Patrol.
4. Loom
This was animated for a cutscene in the 256 color version of Loom. I don't remember for sure if this version of the animation appeared in the final version of the released game.
5. The Dig (Brian Moriarity Version)
Here is some animation from the Brian Moriarity version of The Dig. The first shot is a walk cycle of the creature that is reincarnated for this early version of the skeleton puzzle. The second shot is a death-by-electrocution animation cutscene of a sea creature. Somewhere, there exists an animation I did of two of these creatures ripping one of the characters in two. The third shot is the reincarnation shot of the creature in the skeleton puzzle.
6. The Dig (Noah Falstein Version)
Here are some walk-cycle animations I did of some creatures for the Noah Falstein version of The Dig. The premise in this version of the game was that the world was inhabited by a dying race of six-limbed creatures. Because of this, much of the technology could only be operated by the surviving natives, or by the cooperation of two human characters (it was to be a multi-player game.) The most feared creature in the game was the Terrabat, a creature with a pair of claws and two pairs of wings. A couple of Terrabat animations are shown here.
I have another reel here of animation from various LucasArts games (as they appear in the released product). There are also some animations from the Moriarity version of The Dig and a test animation from the unreleased Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.
