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.

Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot - Production Design

After my work on "The Iron Giant", I was hired to work on a new show at Sony Television, "Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot" (1999). To this day, it remains the most challenging and painstaking production I have worked on.

The show was based on the comic, "Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot" by Geoff Darrow. My job was to design the animated series to directly reflect the look and style of Geoff Darrow's incredible drawings from the comic series. I had been a fan of Darrows for years and was excited at the prospect of bringing this great comic to tv... WITHOUT watering it down!

As you can see from some of my designs, I was also heavily influenced by "Hard Boiled". I used elements of both in the show and lots of 1940s and 50s car parts. Each background designer on the show had to design and rough out his own background. After it was approved by me and the director, the designs were inked! This is a departure from Geoff Darrow's comics which are finished in a very soft pencil. Inking the designs allowed us to maintain a continuity in the overall look.

Sadly, the show was canceled before all 24 episodes were aired due to the extreme violence portrayed. Go figure?

Contour Continuation

Early in school at CalArts, I learned to watch for tangents in my designs. My instructors, Bob Winquist and Mike Giamo, would train us to recognize these design errors and avoid them at all costs.As I studied animation throughout the years, I noticed some artists would intentionally create tangents to make a design statement. The result is, in my opinion, visually striking. I started using this "Contour Continuation" technique as a background designer at Warner Bros Classics. Contour Continuation is the lining up of shapes to continue a contour (or directional element) across the composition. Sometimes this technique is extremely successful and beautiful, other times, it is subtle and almost invisible.

This background design was for a theatrical short, "Nina the Hyena", directed by Disney animator, Dave Kuhn. The look was graphic and stylized. The environment was the African savanna during severe drought. My challenge was to create something visually unique that did NOT resemble "The Lion King".
I have used "Contour Continuation" to create a flowing rhythm to the composition. As the camera pans through the scene, the landscape "flows" by the camera like water so lacking in the environment. The final effect resembles a heat wave. Pay particular attention to the dead tree branches hugging the contour of the hills behind them.

Production Design: Frederick Gardner

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

Prop Test - Part II

This is another part of the prop test I did for Cartoon Network a while back.

This part of the test required me to design an "Anime-style" tank and show it being destroyed by a "monster". I think the Israelis have one of the most advanced Main Battle Tanks in the world. Using the Israeli Merkava Tank as inspiration, I played with the proportions until I cam up with something I though looked plausible, modern and cool. Doing the destroyed version of the tank was a "blast"!

Prop Test

This is a Prop Test I did a while ago for a new show at Cartoon Network.

This part of the test required me to design a "Stealth Ship". Following the basic design in the storyboard, I used the basic shape as my starting point for the first few sketches. As you can see, it didn't take long for me to go in a number of different directions. None of the designs ended up being used, but I think this test shows my thought process and exploration of a design.

I decided to post designs that were successful as well as some, not so successful. Overall, I had fun doing the test, and I think it shows. I think?

The "Stealth Fighter #18" (the ship that looks like a Cicada Fly) was my favorite, because it is so different from what you would expect to see.