Previs Concept / Character Design: DREAMWORKS PICTURES - SMALL SOLDIERS

A while back in my life, I got a call out of the blue from the toy company Hasbro.  I was told that someone had recommended me to do some concept work for some kind of movie, which was a nice surprise.  I wasn't told much about the project because Hasbro wanted to be as secretive as possible.  I didn't even see a script or story outline.  I was just told that there were some monsters and a lead character that had to fight these monsters.  Oh, and the characters were toy action figures.  Living action figures.  

The person (whose name I cannot remember) told me that Hasbro was trying to explore various approaches to the characters they were assigning me to work on.  "Go wild", I remember hearing.  I was clued into the notion that the characters were soldiers of some sort.

This was a helpful hint, as the project it turns out I was working on was Dreamworks Studio's movie Small Soldiers.

I did a number of sketches of various kinds of characters, none of which were being received so well.  I kept hearing comments about how things were generally "not what we're looking for".  This was frustrating, as I wasn't getting a whole lot of direction.  The development team at Hasbro literally was in the initial phase of exploration, and they quite literally didn't know what they were looking for until they saw it.

I ended up taking one of the scribbly sketches that were faxed to me, and I concentrated on developing that.  I went with a more futuristic soldier theme, and added some tech to his body armor.  I basically started designing what I hoped would be a cool-looking action figure that I would have liked to play with when I was a kid.  Okay, or even then at my age...

I had sent this one in, and I got a huge reaction out of it!  I was told that this design (the first one posted above) captured the essence of what this character was all about.  I was very happy I had achieved this for my clients, and was looking forward to doing more design work.

A few years later when I was working on GI Joe: Spytroops at Reel FX Creative Studios, there was a huge initial project meeting where bigwigs from Hasbro flew down to Dallas from Rhode Island, along with original & longtime GI Joe scribe Larry Hama (who gave me my first mainstream comic book assignment while editor at Marvel Comics) who flew in from New York City.

I sat in on the meetings for the whole day, and when there was a lunch break, I walked up to Steve Drucker, (Vice President of IP Development at Hasbro) and introduced myself.  I asked him if he was involved with developing Small Soldiers, and he said he was.  I showed him the illustration designs I did for the movie.  His face lit up with a smile and he said, "Wow, it's really nice to meet you!"  He told me how my soldier design was pivotal to the development to the lead toy character (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones).

I was stoked!  It's really great to hear that kind of stuff being said about my work from someone like that.  I had a great time working for and with Steve Drucker on GI Joe: Spytroops, and GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom.  Steve is one of those people that if you're able to be around him for even a short time, you learn a lot from him about how things work in the toy & film industries.  It doesn't hurt that he's a very nice person, too.

Unfortunately, after I had done the soldier design that got such a great reaction, I was assigned to work on the monster characters.  After what I had designed (in the second picture posted above), they again said things like it was "not what we're looking for".

But abruptly, my assignment ended.  Just like that.  No explanation.  I was told this happens a lot, and since then I've discovered that it truly does.  Just one of the really annoying aspects of this kind of business. 

It was a very short and wild ride.  But at least I was able to get confirmation that my soldier design had a significant effect on the development of the lead toy character.

3D Animation Storyboards / Orthographic Turnarounds for 3D Modeling: HASBRO STAR WARS TOYS

When I worked for Reel FX Creative Studios, I storyboarded for countless toy product commercials, mostly for Hasbro.  One of the jobs I had was to storyboard was a simple 3-5 second 'bumper' for the Star Wars toy commercials.  The approved concept I came up with was of the soldier droids from Star Wars: Phantom Menace, moving along an assmebly line with the Star Wars logo integrated into the back wall.  Just something visually cool to do for the beginning or the end of the commercials.

I was able to convey the concept in one single pan-shot frame storyboard, notated to specification.  In addition, I was given a previs design done by one of the Star Wars production designers, and assigned to produce orthographic turnarounds of it for 3D modeling, which you see below the bumper frame.  I had to take the previs design, and then extrapolate from the single representation to work up accurate views from all sides (except from the bottom, this time).

Even when I get paid to do my work, often a job goes nowhere and is abandoned.  That happened with this assignment.  I got to see a 3D test of the orthographics I worked on, and it was beautiful!  When we found out this was a no-go, there was a collective exclamation that came from all who worked on this project.

I can't repeat what a lot of us said here in this blog.  That would be just rude.

But it was fun to do!

3D Animation Storyboards: GI JOE: VALOR vs. VENOM - How To Do Motion Capture On The CHEAP

Gather around, boys and girls.  I'm going to tell you how you can do 'motion capture' without the motion capture technology!

In a previous post about the 3D-animated film GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom, produced for Hasbro by Reel FX Creative Studios, I talked about the time constraints involved in producing an 88-minute, 3D-animated film (reduced ultimately down to 77 minutes for whatever reason) in just under a year.  I showed you the 'pretty' finished storyboards of the security guard being attacked by the floating Cobra machines, and I talked about how the rest of the storyboards weren't as pretty, or finished-looking.

These storyboards here (in animatic form) demonstrate what happens when the time constraints become exponentially tighter and tighter.

Reel FX's application development team had created a proprietary production management pipeline tool called INSIGHT that manages their production pipeline in 'real time', allowing their clients visibility and transparency to production and costs at any stage of the production.  In this program, you could easily see every version of each stage of production.

As the storyboards were completed in their various rough-to-finished stages, the frames were input individually into INSIGHT.  Those frames were then made into animatics, to be synced up with sound & voice for timing.  Since we were on such an incredibly tight deadline, everyone was going at such an all-out fast pace, especially in the storyboarding.  Valor vs. Venom producer Will Meugniot pitched in to storyboard several key scenes, and the amazing Kerry Gammill worked at a deliberate pace to produce some very beautiful storyboards.

I storyboarded about 75% of the movie & served as Storyboard Supervisor, in addition to having spent a full month doing a first draft of storyboards for the whole film before full production started.  One of the biggest challenges I had in this film was to storyboard as sophisticated and exciting group of ninja fight scenes as I could present within the limited timeframe and budget that we had to work with.  I wanted to show more of the mechanics of Snake Eyes' and Storm Shadow's martial arts abilities in these scenes.

One obvious way to do this with today's animation technology is with motion capture (or motion tracking, or mocap) the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model.  This animation data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as the actor.  A performer wears markers near each joint to identify the motion by the positions or angles between the markers.

What was even more obvious was that we just didn't have the budget to do this whatsoever.

But then I had an idea.  What if I was able to create a 'low-tech' version of motion capture?  I heard someone at Reel FX mention that they had a friend who was a martial arts expert, and it got me thinking about how to set this proposal up.

After I storyboarded the first draft all the ninja fight scenes, I hired an amazing martial artist & stunt man named Ilram Choi (who has gone on to do stunt work for movies such as Thor, Avatar, Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Last Airbender, and you may have seen his work as the leaping & bounding stunt-double for John Cho's Sulu in JJ Abrams' Star Trek).  Ilram and his other martial arts friend (whose name I cannot remember) spent the day with me at a local gymnastics center to film their live-action reenactments and interpretations of my first draft storyboards.

We had dressed both martial artists in white leotard body stockings.  I took a huge magic marker and drew circles on their chests, legs, knees, shoulders, elbows & backs.  These circles were to serve as the mapping markers to identify the motion by the positions or angles of their movements, as reference for the animators to interpret as they completed Ilram & friend's final performance in digital form.

Afterward, I took this filmed reference and used it to re-storyboard all the ninja fight scenes in as much detail as I could.  I would incorporate all of the movements that Ilram & friend interpreted for us as painstakingly as possible, in order to make sure that the animators could literally go through the animatics frame by frame for guidance for the ninja's body movements.  This is where things got very difficult in the schedule, as I was also having to process all the other storyboards from Will Meugniot & Kerry Gammill, supervise Scott Youtsey's able storyboard cleanup work (which kept me from going insane at one point during production), while still occasionally being called upon to work on some of Reel FX's commercial storyboards.

This was the stage at which the schedule was so tight, I was putting in 14+ hour days, producing at times as much as 250-300 frames a day.  This certainly sounds absurd and ridiculous, but after all the prep work I described above, I knew what needed to be done.  It was just a matter of doing the very best I could to just finish the storyboards in time to be put into animatic form, so animation assignments could be handed out to keep the production rolling along.  To accomplish this, there was no way I could have drawn the frames more detailed. 

One distinct advantage of working not only on a 3D-animated project, but certainly on an internal project like Valor vs. Venom, was that (unlike 2D storyboards) I didn't have to worry about every belt buckle and costume detail needing to being precisely drawn.  The 3D models were already built & rigged, and ready to go to animation.  All I had to do was provide good storytelling and composition.  This guerrilla-type of animation process would certainly NOT work as well in most other animation pipeline structures.  But we had a job to do in the timeframe we were given, so we had to be innovative.

It made everyone swoon with envy to think of what it would be like to work on a production such as Shrek, or Monster House, or any Pixar film, with their really big budgets and their wonderfully extended deadlines.  But with the budget, resources & timeframe we had to work with, in many ways it was like a massive group-sprint to the finished line, with everyone carrying Toyotas on their backs.

No matter what, the bottom line in productions like this one... especially in productions like this one, is you need a group of the most dedicated hard-working people who are passionate enough to do the very best they can under the most restricted, truncated schedules ever, who believed beyond reasoning that they could conquer anything in the world.

The people at Reel FX, and those others who worked on this project were those kind of people.  

3D Animation Storyboards: GI JOE: VALOR vs. VENOM

The follow-up to Reel FX Creative Studios' production of GI Joe: Spytroops (which I posted about here), was GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom.  Reel FX was progressing in their efforts to raise themselves up to the next significant level by proving they can handle a feature-length film.  However, as we had the terrible five-month killer deadline with Spytroops, that deadline was kind of repeated.  Whereas Spytroops was a 44-minute movie done in five months' time, Valor vs. Venom's deadline was basically doubled.  Still an incredibly tight deadline, we were assigned to produce an 80-minute movie in just under a year.

When Hasbro's execs were visiting Reel FX before production began on Valor vs. Venom, Director Dale Carman took a break from their meeting to come to me and ask, "How long would it take for you to do the first draft of storyboards for the whole movie?  A month?  Say a month.  Say yes to a month."

Hey, he's my boss.  Of course I said "yes"!

So I spent a month doing a rough pass at storyboarding this movie, without benefit of any previsualization or concept drawings.  As with Spytroops, we again embarked upon animating a movie with a structure that wasn't like a relay race (where chronologically, the one stage of development was handed off to the next one in line), but more like a total race to the finish by all the departments, each throwing the 'relay bar' back and forth to each other along the way.

What I mean by that is, by the time I storyboarded the first pass, some of the set design concepts were well underway.  I would then have to adjust my storytelling to any previs that was developed.  Conversely, whatever I had storyboarded before any previs had been started, usually determined what the previs would look like, to accommodate my boards.  Invariably, storyboards still had to be tweaked & redone many, many times, over and over.  It was an incredibly frenetic, yet organized kind of perpetual chaos.

Here is the opening scene from GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom, in its completed form: 

I served as Storyboard Supervisor & I storyboarded about 75% of the final movie, with additional storyboards done by Kerry Gammill and producer Will Meugniot.  I made the mistake at one point of trying to do what I call the 'pretty' finished-looking storyboards (like what you see above), but our deadline just didn't allow for that.  At one point, I was producing several hundred storyboard frames a day.  Believe me, that can put some severe pain in your hand.

3D Animation Storyboards: GI JOE: SPYTROOPS

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.

Advertising Storyboards: HASBRO NERF LAZER TAG

Another job working for Reel FX Creative Studios, who handles many of (if not most) Hasbro toy commercials at any given time, was Hasbro's Nerf Lazer Tag toys.  Hasbro commercials are fun to work on.  One day you'll be storyboarding My Little Pony, then Transformers or Zoids, Super Soakers, or anything to do with Nerf commercials.  It always keeps you on your toes.

Penciled & inked, then scanned & graytoned in Photoshop.

Previsualization / Concept Art / Environment Design: HASBRO GI JOE Commercial Ad

My very first job at Reel FX Creative Studios was to work on the second all CG-animated one-minute GI JOE.com website commercial.

The opening shot of this commercial was of a destroyed Cobra base of operations.  I was asked to come up with a design, which I turned in the next day.  In that design, I augmented the pencils with graytones from markers.

I went right on to storyboarding the commercial.  Several days later, I was shown the opening shot.  It was awesome!  Creative Director Brandon Oldenburg took my Cobra base drawing, did a color treatment in Photoshop of it, then had it pasted on stock footage of a mountaintop pan shot with smoke billowing out of it!

It was only a 3 second shot, but it was simply amazing to see how things get put together.

Advertising Storyboards: HASBRO ZOIDS

Okay, this is how you become a glutton for punishment.  It's bad enough that my hand almost falls off while drawing Transformers storyboards, but now I end up drawing something just as detailed, if not more: Zoids!

Intricately detailed work under a tight deadline.  This is the stuff that makes me have to put my hand in a bowl of ice to recover. . . ouch!  Work done for Hasbro, through Reel FX Creative Studios.

Storyboards penciled & inked.

Advertising Storyboards: HASBRO TRANSFORMERS

Among the many duties while working with Reel FX Creative Studios, I would do advertising storyboards.  One of the most fun things to work on were the Transformers toy spots for Hasbro.  That is, except for all the excruciating details of the toys themselves.  They really are "more than meets the eye". 

Hey, you draw all those details and see if your hand doesn't fall off!