iPad Granimator

It was a real honour to be asked by UsTwo to be part of their creative project for iPad: Graninator - back in the days before iPads existed outside of Apples lab of shiny things. And especially when I saw the other folks involved, like me old pal Jon Burgerman, monsterous hero Pete Fowler, and the super-tight work of James Joyce, Buro Destruct, Airside & Moving Brands.

So, Granimator is a free creative package, for designing wallpapers for your iPad and iPhone - it's super-simple to spray artwork all over the screen, and tweak and edit to your hearts content, and then share it with your friends or the world.

Once you've got Granimator you can buy downloadable art packs, which are about the price of a crayon. and start creating. And obviously I'd love it if anyone bought my one, so I can buy myself some new crayons. Or even, one day, an iPad..

So you can just go and get the REXBOX - HI-DRAMA! PACK but if you want to know more here's what you get from me:

Here's some more artwork, sprayed around ala Graminator:

Go buy. Thanks! Bye!

Old Project Roundup: Mysteriously Sporty Characters

Next project from down-the-back-of-my-sofa: an early-stage pitch I did last year, for some sporty characters. I can't go into much detail about this project, or the client, but here are some preliminary roughs which never got to see the light of day...

I was hoping to see these characters animated with a mixture of gloopy/fizzy CG and jerky traditional animation (for the facial expressions) and running, jumping and hurdling around live-action filmed environments, leaving colour and animation in their wake.

Except they didn't, because they fell over at the first hurdle and some other much shinier characters sprinted past them. Ah well.

Surprise Lover

Trophy Monkey

I did a bit of designing in the third dimension recently, as I had the huge privilege to design this years re-skinning of the Vector Monkey trophy for Spike TV's annual VGA Awards (the Video Game Awards er.. Awards). Because we (as in Media Molecule, my LittleBigPlanet-making pals) won the award last year for Best Team, Spike TV thought it would fun if we designed this years trophy, so I got busy with the neon paint.

I wanted it to fully embody our Media Molecule way of reusing and re-appropriating found materials, so I came up with a design that changes the content of the statue without changing the physical shape. So, instead of the monkeys face being straight-on, he's looking upwards and crunching on the crown with his bitey maw. OH NOM NOM NOM he later commented.

Here's Jack Black waving one around (which apparently I'm told he broke later, the butterfingered rascal) and Jake Gyllenhaaaal staring at one, wondering what the hell he's looking at.

As it's now become a new tradition for the winner of the Best Team category to design next years trophy I can't wait to see what Rocksteady design. Especially after having my socks and spats blown off by their tremendous Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Fngz Of Fury

Yikes. So busy. Can't complain though - but it has been a month since I updated on here so I'm going to try and start hacking through the backlog. So first up is this the Fngrz of Fury web game I made for Orange with my pals at Poke London and Player3.

The game stars the two guys from the Orange cinema ads (Which are actually really good. The Steven Segal one is my favourite) fighting past a number of characters with the power of texting. So the faster you can type the better you do. A bit like Typing of The Dead from back in the day, except with no shooting, and no zombies. But featuring deadly udders squirting corrosive bad juice.

This was a fun one, as I could really concentrate on the character design and animation (just as well as I had only a few short days to do it). Here's some of the characters, combined together into what we technically call a jpg:



And you can play it now here. I still really struggle to beat the giant hamster. See if you can...

Letting The Beatles Be

I got asked recently to take part in a fun project - redesign or reinterpret the cover of any album from the top 100 albums of all time (as chosen by Pitchfork) for the folk at Becks Beer.

So I leapt on "Let it Be" by The Beatles (well, actually I leapt on Purple Rain, but Kate Moross had already picked that one, so I swapped pvc and superbikes for coudroy and facial hair). I've written up in more detail on Becks' Flickr page my thoughts behind choosing this cover, mainly for the challenge of creating a likeness of the band while also sticking with my bold style, so you can read more about it in detail there.

But here's the image:





And here's some work-in-progress, as you can see from the Ringo sketch I was originally thinking of using a more realistic style, closer to brilliant artwork they used themselves on Revolver (by Klaus Voormann) before switching back to a bolder simpler style so I could concentrate on getting likenesses with as little extraneous detail as possible.





And in Beatles related news, there's a new trailer out for the forthcoming Beatles Rock-Band game, which, although I have not interest in actually playing, looks amazing in the Sgt Pepper segment at about 1:00 in. I want to see more games that use colour, lighting and post-effects like that more. Down with polycounts! Up with art direction!

Guybrush Threepwood

One of my favourite games from childhood, Monkey Island, is getting a re-release next week, all smartened up for the HD generation. Personally i'm not a fan of the new HD visuals, probably because I grew up with the old version, I'm a big fan of pixelly retro-ness and the youngsters shouldn't listen to old salty dogs like me.

But in the meantime I couldn't resist a sketch of the games sometime-hero Guybrush Threepwood as he exists in my world of doodles and piratey memories:

DuckMonster Destroys PixelToyko OMG!

I've been a bit slow to post this one (although its now very relevant, as if you purchase The Sun newspaper (U.K.) tomorrow you'll find out more) but I was involved in a crazy project recently called RubberDuckZilla for Coca-Colas tasty fruit cocktail "Oasis".




If you visit the site linked below (and have a webcam) you can play various games that I did the 16-bit retro visuals for, after being asked to do them very nicely by PokeLondon. And by harnessing the power of GEEKMAGIC (tm) your webcam puts you inside the game and turns you into a giant duck shooting lazers out of your eyes (a bit like this Project Natel that my old pals at Lionhead are making for Xbox360, but with more wonkiness and lazerin' and explodin' and for a whole load less less money and with less digichildren).

Anyway, you can play the games here:
www.rubberduckzilla.com

And you can watch the tv spot in this handily embedded video:



And, as I said at the top, if you buy The Sun newspaper tomorrow (11th June) and wave it around in front of your webcam you'll be able to unlock some extra special features. Blimey!

Doodlebook Dump One

As I was saying in the last post, I've been scanning in my sketchbook for this months Computer Arts magazine feature. And I'll put them (and a few more) up here on The Internets for all to see. So here's the first batch of impenitable doodling, these examples are more about story development, I'll post some others soon thant show character development.




These all feature work for my Grip Wrench series for MTV. As you can probably see, most of my thought process happens on paper, and really consists mainly of doodling ideas until I get enough of a collection to edit down into something fit for human consumption...

Here's some close-ups:

Stand Up

I'm off to FMX in Stuttgart next week, with Kareem & Francis from MediaMolecule, to talk about how we made the wonky world of LittleBigPlanet. It looks like there's some interesting programmes on, I might have to sneak in and geek out on the various talks on the production design of Hellboy2 and Watchmen.

Talking of Watchmen, here's a portrait of The Commedian, it's not really finished but I'll have to leave it as it is for now..

Psst!

I've been asked to make a film for this years PSST! Pass It On - 17 collaborative films made by covens of motion-graphics warlocks and animation alchemists. It'll be launching around the world at various events in the next few weeks, and you can pre-order the DVD here.

My film is a collaboration with Bran Dougherty-Johnson of Grow Design Work and my particular section concerns a time-traveling aphrodisiac, a cup of tea, and a famous nursery rhyme. It looks like this:

MAN OF MEAT. MAN OF ACTION.

I've finally put my website for Grip Wrench live. It's the animated series I made for MTV QOOB, featuring Hollywood hardman, Vietnam veteran and fearless patriot Grip Wrench. And basically gave me plenty of sleepless nights for a year and a half while I was trying to animate all 10 episodes on my own (whilst doing LittleBigPlanet at the same time). What a nutter.



Anyway, its probably best if you just go and have a look yourself, there's some iphone wallpapers too (which I think all promo websites have to have now by law..) desktop backgrounds and of course all 10 episodes are on there, although here's an embedded episode which is one of my favourites:

Mr Sim

As I was logging into my Facebook page this morning I got assaulted by a load of banner adverts with things whizzing about and distracting me, and they were more distracting to me than usual because I made them.

Orange and Poke asked me to work up a character I was playing around with back when I was illustrating and animating the Good Things Should Never End site: an animated Sim card. And he's now gone on to star in a number of ads and print stuff. Famous little fella.

Mister Sim is a miscevious little chap, obsessed with eating and talking and flashing his gold gnashers. He's just generally extremely mouthy despite his tiny size, as you can see from some of the examples I've lifted out of the ads below.

Orange have also made him a fan page too on Facebook, although be careful: he does bite.

Branson Pickle

I don't understand why so many of my doodles turn out looking like millionaire "playboy" Richard Branson. It's quite disturbing.

Especially with the absence of any clothes.

onedotzero twothousandandeight

This years onedotzero kicks off soon, traveling the world and squirting hot beautiful images into the audiences eyeballs. There's going to be something exciting happening in Buenos Aires to kick off the world tour from the 26th to 28th of September. In the meantime here's a preview video of some of the things screening at this years tour. At 00:17 you might be able to spot Grip Wrench playing a guitar solo on the roof of a monster truck to a leopard...


onedotzero_adventures in motion from onedotzero on Vimeo.

Seeing this video has reminded me to get back into using Vimeo again, its such a great site for video. Here's my very out-of-date Vimeo page.

Grip Wrench splashes himself on Computer Arts

My Grip Wrench character has turned up in this months Computer Arts magazine, in a section about my inspiration behind the character and the series. So next time you are down the local newagents buying penny-whistles and moonbeams have a look. It looks like this, and has a stupid quote by me on the cover:

70p at Stokefest

If anyone is around east London this Sunday I'll be at Stokefest, the free festival in Stoke Newington, Hackney, doing some live urban art next to the stage. As the festival is a little oasis in the city we've decided to work on a different kind of canvas, a tent!

They'll be around seven of us working on the tent. Tortoy, one of the collaborators on this, came up with the genius name for our tent decorating collective: 70p (Seven Tipi). 

Hope to see you there!

Unitard

I knew my latest episode of Grip Wrench needed a unicorn scene, so during the weekend started sketching some whilst sunbathing, which brought on much amusement from my lazing-around-in-the-sunshine companion. I couldn't see what was funny until she pointed out I drew my unicorns with the horn on the end of the nose, rather than on the forehead.

(the other unicorn on that page was drawn after being shown the error of my ways)

I'd never thought about this before, and had always drawn them that way. I must have been been the laughing stock of the Fantasy Arts Guild. I don't know if they have a Guild, but I expect they do, and spend many a fun-filled evening in the tavern ordering flagons of ale from the "barkeep" and taking turns with the Cloak of Invisibility(+3). I better make sure I don't draw my dwarves too tall or my dragons with fur or I'll get punched on the nose by invisible assailant smelling of Real Ale.

Anyway, thanks to her input I've managed to draw a proper Unicorn now. Here's the final result which I'm currently animating. Horses (and horses with mythical horns) are a nightmare to animate, but a nice challenge.

Funny how all girls, no matter if they are artistic or not, seem to be able to draw perfect horses, when its the one thing that most artists say are particularly hard to draw. I guess it comes from huge amounts of doodling in the back of school-books before discovering they were more interested in having a boy than a pony.

Ladyflesh of the Ancients

Snow is falling, I'm attempting to watch Renaissance with one eye (not my sort of animation at all, looks like a load of Poser models bumping into each other), and I'm typing this on my new Macbook Pro, surrounded by all the scattered manuals for my newly purchased Adobe CS3 crate of software. 

All this new kit should really speed up my, what I think professionals call, "workflow" - which is just as well, as animation is probably the slowest and most time-consuming artistic medium of all... And what am I using all this new equipment for? Making an old ladies breasts jiggle about. Big lumps of eighty year old ladyflesh pressed up against the screen are probably exactly how Apple Computer Inc were hoping I would unlock my creativity. 

Here's a still of her, before the top comes off. You wouldn't want to see a static shot of her after that happens, trust me.

Its taken from one tiny scene of my MTV QOOB animated series Grip Wrench, that'll be hitting screens soon (both on the telly, and online). 

...And then all will be revealed (consider that a warning).

BAD-EGG

Todays egg-based theme inspired me to doodle a egg wrestler. He's warped from years of performance-enhancing drugs, with a bulletproof shell and yolk-stained underpants: