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.

Transparency, Texture & Color Reversal

A few years ago, I was doing some experimentation in Visual Development with the amazing Disney Artist/Painter, Scott Fassett. Using my background in design from Warner Bros and Cartoon Network, I wanted to incorporate some tricks I had used (and had seen used by Art Directors on popular 2D productions) in a CG environment. Scott brought his fine art and Disney influences and, together, we developed a re-imagined classic cartoon look.

This painting highlights some subtle, yet complex details used by Picasso, Maurice Noble and Eyvind Earle. Self colored lines and the sponge tool (in Photoshop) we liberally used to create a "hand painted" look. The sponge broadens the range of color and brings a richness to the digital canvas. You will notice the posters on the wall and telephone pole are transparent. The colors are influenced by overlapping each other and the surface they are on. The lettering on some of the posters reverses in shadow or when overlapped by another poster. This is subtle, but brings a sophistication to an otherwise mundane street scene. The wood grain on the telephone pole and the grout in the wall also reverse (light to dark) in the shadow. I really wanted to use a lot of modern art techniques in the final look of our visual tests.

Something else Scott and I really enjoyed exploring was the use of color panels. These "color panels" (used with great success in Disney's Sword in the Stone and 101 Dalmations) allow for subtle color shifts in the "half light" are of the subject matter I think it creates a real "luminous" quality you would otherwise miss using flat color or traditional mixed color. You can see examples of the "color panels" on the Bus Stop bench, the telephone pole and the wood fence on the left of the image.

Production Design: Frederick Gardner
Art Direction: Scott Fassett

Gators

I was working on visual development for a "Gator Farm" in the film, Jack & Ben, and kinda fell in love with drawing alligators. My friends, Ovi Nedelcu and Chris Sasaki did some amazing alligators too. I was really great to see everyone's different take.

Graveyard Angels

A few years ago, I was working on designs for a graveyard (for the film, Jack & Ben) and thought it would be visually exciting for most of the gravestones to have wings of some kind - as the film was about two bird brothers. I was inspired my grave stones from cemeteries in the South. I really liked the idea of these angels as "guardians" of the cemetery.

Log Tugger

One of the many cool things about living in Oregon, is all the amazing history just laying in fields or on the side of the road. While driving on the highway, I saw this amazing old truck sitting in a field, covered in blackberry vines. After doing a bit of research, I found out this old truck was used in the logging industry as "tugger". My understanding is, it was used to pull felled trees from the woods into open fields where they could be loaded onto logging trucks.

1965 Mercury Comet

I love the '65 Mercury Comet. It is the "ideal" family station wagon.