Velcome...

I LOVE the classic Universal Monsters and am thinking about doing something with those characters. Here's the first piece.

Sharks and Gorillas!

Last week was one of the best weeks ever! I went to a killer party last Saturday hosted by two of the coolest guys in the world (thanks Jeff and Darren!). On Sunday, I nerded out with some fellow monster enthusiasts and met a great new friend, Michael Roddy. Michael is the producer of the new JAWS documentary, The Shark is Still Working. This is, by far the most comprehensive documentary on one of my favorite films of all time. If you love JAWS or are just a film fan in general , PLEASE check it out. Trust me you'll love it.

Now after the sharks and monsters, you'd think I'd be in nerd overload. Well, you'd be wrong:) Thanks to Michael, I got to visit the legendary home of two of the sweetest people in the world, Bob and Kathy Burns. Bob has one of the most amazing collections of movie props ever. He has everything from Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon costume to the Queen alien head. However, the most amazing pieces in his collection are the original armatures for King King and Mighty Joe Young!!! As I approached the pedestal they were sitting on, Kathy started giving me instructions on how to HOLD them. When I looked at her stunned, she simply said," What's the point of having them if you can't PLAY with them. The photo above shows how I felt about this incredible honor.

While seeing the collection was cool, spending time with Bob and Kathy was even cooler!

After all of that, I capped the week off watching Star Trek with my mom and dad. Yep, this has pretty much been the best week ever!

Go see CORALINE!!!

Well, I can't believe it's finally coming out. I moved to Portland on Jan.9, 2006 to work on Coraline. I loved Portland, I loved the crew and I am so proud that I got to work on this film.

Here's some stuff I did while I was there.




The blonde gal above is based on a woman I saw in downtown Portland. She came stomping out of a halfway house and was so furious she spit really hard on the sidewalk.

Now go see the movie. It comes out this Friday!!!

ULTRAMAN!!!!

Well hello all! I've been EXTREMELY busy, but figured I'd post some sketches I did for a dream project I'm working on.

I'm doing a poster for a company in Asia featuring one of my favorite characters of all time. These are studies I did to explore color, composition and style. The final piece will have Ultra fighting one of his giant monster foes.

Tom Oreb deserves some love!

So I picked up the Sleeping Beauty Blu-Ray yesterday and it is MINDBLOWING! The images and colors are absolutely beautiful. The transfer is flawless. However, there's one huge oversight on the disc that I want to bring attention to.

There's a pretty cool documentary on the dvd about the history of the film. They show tons of cool artwork and photos, including color film of Tom Oreb himself hangin' out with some animators. The thing that got my dander up was that they don't mention Mr.Oreb's name once. Oh, they show his artwork and talk about the evolution of the film's style; but they give all the design credit to Eyvind Earle. Now don't get me wrong, I love Eyvind Earle's work, but you can't really talk about the design of Sleeping Beauty without mentioning Tom Oreb. However, this is exactly what the producer's of this documentary did.

I get to hear how Mary Costa "painted" with her voice. I get to hear about how they used live action reference. I get a discourse on how Walt gave absolute design authority to Eyvind Earle, because he felt the studio had missed something by not staying faithful to a designer's work. The example used was Mary Blair. I love me some Mary Blair, but it seems like they wedged her into this documentary just to talk about her work, AGAIN. As far as I know, she had nothing to do with this film.

On the other hand, Tom Oreb, the guy who is responsible for the character styling of the film, get's no mention, no discussion... nothing. Also, they've omitted much of his work from the gallery section of the disc. The previous dvd has tons of model sheets and designs created by Mr.Oreb. Why they wouldn't keep this artwork for this disc I have no idea.

Anyway, I had to get on my soapbox a little bit. I'm glad that Disney released this disc, but it's really awful that they don't even mention Tom.

Tom, wherever you are, cheers to you man! Thanks for the beautiful work and the inspiration.

My wife and United Airlines

Between January and March, I was a pretty lonely guy. My wife Megan, moved to Ojai for a bit to work on Jamie Caliri's latest United Airlines commercial, Heart.

Thankfully, it isn't lame and I guess my lonely nights were somewhat justified.

Congrats babe! I'm only a nepotist for you;)

Click above image to see the coolness!

Puppets!

I've been insanely busy with work, but now that it's slowing down a bit, I thought I'd post something really cool.

I was walking around Comic Con this past weekend, and to my utter shock the Neca toy booth had the Coraline puppets on display!

Finally, people can see how amazing the fabrication crew on this film is (actually the whole crew is amazing)!

Anyway, thanks to these guys, I got to see my designs turned into amazingly, beautiful puppets. As anyone whose worked in animation knows, it's very rare that you get to a see design you created, make it faithfully into the final film. So, cheers to the puppet crew and to Henry Selick for giving me so much freedom.

Speaking of the amazing crew Shane Prigmore did the final Coraline design (based on Dan Krall's early drawings), Other Mother, as well as all the beautiful expressions for the replacements heads. Dan Krall designed the ghost boy.

I designed the blue guy, Mr.Bobinski.