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.