Mojo's Lair

This is one of my background designs for Mojo's Lair used in "The Powerpuff Girls" movie. This design shows Mojo Jojo's monkey mind control panel. He uses it to create his primate army. 

I had worked on PPG for several years and was excited we were finally doing a movie (first for Cartoon Network). A lot of great artists worked on the film. The style (Art Directed by my friend, Mike Moon) was a creative mix of 2D and 3D (CG).

Pinecone Peak

In one of the last versions of the script for the film, "Jack & Ben", our main characters travel to a location referred to as "Pinecone Peak". I was asked to explore the look of this location.

At first, I designed some pretty realistic locations, as based on the storyboards... but then I thought, "how do the birds know what Pinecone Peak is? They can't read a map!" So that's when I was inspired to do something more literal and surreal. "Perhaps the peak is named for the bizarre way it looks, not because of the trees on its surface!" That is how I came up with the designs for this location. As you can see, some are more subtle than others. I would like to see all of them in an animated film.

Stylizing Trees

From 2006-2009, I worked on a CG animated film called, Jack and Ben at Laika Studios. The project was never completed and CG animation production was stopped. During that 2 and a half year period, I had the great fortune of being able to pursue a number of different styles for a single film.

What you see here are the fourth and fifth iterations of design for this film as directed by Barry Cook. I spent a number of weeks exploring tree shapes and textures. I wanted to find a unique way of distilling a particular species of tree into it's most basic shape language. These are some of those explorations.

MORE Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

 


Here is some more of my work from the series "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot". The series never aired all of the episodes created for both seasons. It's run was cut short because Fox executives deemed the series to be too violent! I guess they had never seen the comic book on which this series was based. Some of the designs here are from the "lost" second season. All of the episodes can be found on on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U6yvbgtVm0). As the series progressed, the writers penned episodes that took our characters to locations never seen in the comics created by Geoff Darrow and Frank Miller. The comic series originally took place entirely in a futuristic version of Tokyo. The animated series took place in a fictitious metropolis called, New Tronic City which was a stylized merging of Tokyo, New York and Chicago of the future. It was a challenge to continue this detail-heavy production design in a primordial jungle or underground volcano complex, but I think we succeeded.