At the time when Reel FX Creative Studios was more of a boutique animation & VFX company, they were awarded the job of producing GI Joe: Spytroops, a 44-minute 3D-animated DVD that was to be placed within & exclusively distributed inside toy packaging.
The deadline was a crusher: Reel FX had to, from the ground up, build 3D models for several dozen characters, as many vehicles and weapons, build sets, storyboard, rig, texture & animate everything in JUST OVER FIVE MONTHS. I was flown to New York City to sit in a hotel suite with one other storyboard person (who did not nearly produce as much as I did, but was still a great help), Steve Drucker (Vice President of IP Development at Hasbro) & Larry Hama (writer & creator of a vast majority of the GI Joe universe), to get the first pass of storyboards finished.
There was only a loose outline of a story at that time, and things were quite unorganized, as this was a very truncated, unconventional process to do. Everyone agreed with my organization, to type out "bullet points" of every action in the morning, and then we would storyboard those bullet points for the rest of the day. In the ten days we were in that hotel suite, I'm proud to say we were able to complete the first draft of the movie, from beginning to end. This includes the one day we had off, and the additional day where we had to present all the storyboards done so far to the Big Wigs of Hasbro.
When we got back to Reel FX in Dallas, I spent the rest of the five-month production schedule redoing storyboards until literally a week before the final animation production deadline. Reel FX had never placed a 'final stop date' to Hasbro for when they had to give final approval for storyboarding. So, it seemed that every other someone at Hasbro had a say in this or that, forcing us to keep changing things, well after voice recording was done.
The second video above of the sky battle sequence is a good example of how fast we all were having to go. Several months after we had started our five month, soup-to-nuts process of producing this 44 minute 3D-animated film, the co-director of the movie (and co-founder of Reel FX) Dale Carman came to me one morning with a huge challenge. He told me that due to all of the changes of this-or-that from all the Hasbro executives, we suddenly had a situation where we had all the GI Joes up in the air in their cargo plane, needing to get down below to the Cobra base for the final confrontation. He needed me to come up with some kind of scene that accomplishes this by the end of the day.
Oh, and we weren't allowed to have any dialogue! The voice talent was recorded literally months before, and would be too expensive to get someone in even for a single line or two. So I had to come up with this whole scene, which was a very well-received by Dale Carman & Hasbro, but unfortunately due to needing to compress literally the whole movie to fit everything into the 44-minute format of the DVD, it 'sped up' the pacing of this scene, making everything looking somewhat rushed.
As you can see in the 'before & after' videos in this post, the storyboards that were drawn were not the tightest drawings. But they were readable. We were all going at such an incredible pace, we had to keep drawing as fast as possible all the time. The other guy drawing storyboards with me in New York City did not like the pace that we kept right out of the starting gate in that hotel room, and he ended up quitting Reel FX a week after we got back, leaving me to primarily be the sole storyboard guy. That is, with the exception of the amazing Jake Parker, who storyboarded the scenes of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's battles, and did his storyboards directly in a flash-animation format.
During this five month period of time, I also served as sole storyboard artist for Reel FX for their advertising commercial assignments (oddly enough, mostly of Hasbro products)! Some days were a lovely circus act... spinning plates, juggling Toyotas & flaming cats, and storyboarding as fast as humanly possible.
Hasbro's budget on this near-impossible endeavor was a paltry $600,000.00 for such an determined project. You will never find anything as complex and ambitious as GI Joe: Spytroops done by anyone else for that low a cost. I was told the final cost for the whole project was well over twice Hasbro's budget, for which Reel FX themselves made up the difference.
An incredible challenge! But Reel FX Creative Studios - and myself, it felt - did the impossible.
