Monarch

I got to work on Fox television’s “Monarch” TV series about a family of country music legends as secrets and drama unfolds. Although regrettably cancelled, it featured some fantastic original songs and covers interspersed throughout, performed by the cast of talented musicians and singers, including Susan Sarandon and Trace Adkins, Anna Friel and others. There were lots of interesting things to work on especially including lots of renderings and previz to help sell the stage setups and motion graphics.

The First Lady – Betty Ford

This is block 2 of the First Ladies, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Set from the 1930s to the 60s and 70s, it was very interesting doing all the research and recreating the look of the various periods. We were liberty to recreate many things as accurately as possible, which was a blast.

Dear Even Hansen

Growing up I have long been a fan of musicals, and I couldn’t have been more excited to join the art dept of an excellent one starring Ben Platt, with songs by Pasek and Paul. It was an amazing experience with a truly great art dept, and I couldn’t have been happier with the results. I ‘ve posted some selections here, but as always there’s more behind the scenes that didn’t make it in!

American Gothic Painting

For MacGyver The producers wanted an American Gothic style painting that could be in a dream sequence to add a sense of surrealism to a scene. I had the idea of adding a lightbulb instead of a pitchfork, and I reconstructed an abstract scene with stock imagery. While the general composition is similar, all elements were original. To add a painted-look I did a combination of filters, smudging and paint-over to achieve an interesting, textured effect. It was printed on canvas and the painters did a transparent paint-over to add some additional depth. The producer liked it so much he insisted we send him the original for the writers room. See below for a short video showing the different layers.

Here’s how it looked on set

Here’s a video clip showing the layers:

Irresisitble Film Graphics

Trying something different here. I thought I’d just include a smattering of graphics from the project to show the breadth of the project, rather than organizing by type of item. The Film Irresistible was great fun to work on and the script was very funny. I was very proud of my work on it and I was glad to meet Jon Stewart who was essentially the news, back when I was in college.

Grim Reaper Lockout screen

In Macgyver S04E09 a government mainframe gets infiltrated by a mysterious hacker who’s only calling card is a sinister grim reaper figure wagging its finger. They wanted the artwork to look like an old NES game so I looked up the classic NES color palette and used that for the animation. I also was careful to use the NES’ real screen resolution to lend a little extra authenticity

Here’s the final version with the animation. Note each frame of the hand wagging actually had to be custom made to as the resolution was too low to simply rotate the hand in photoshop.

Here’s an early version where it was a skull, which they later changed to a plague mask to make it more interesting and unique:

Here’s how it appeared in the episode. Spooky!

The Shiva Weapon – Concept and Design

I was lucky enough to get to do the design concept for the “SHIVA” weapon, which was features and used heavily throughout the first half of MacGyver Season 4. It was a fictional weapon designed by Nicola Tesla himself, designed as a super-weapon that could stop war. The idea was that it was some kind of turret gun/tesla coil mashup so I ran with those ideas to make some interesting shapes that would look cool and intricate from various angles and got the concept together in about a day. Shout out to Katie Wheelock for creating the sketchup model/construction drawings and designing the control panel! Also shout out to the amazing construction team on Macgyver for building the thing, which included coiling copper wires around tubes for hours. Thanks a ton!

Artemis Jayne Product Box

The producers wanted something that recalled the Drew Struzen-esque movie posters from the eighties, especially those inspired by Riply from the film Alien. I had to create a fictional strong female character for an imaginary film. unfortuantely we only had a day to finalize the artwork, so there was a bit of a scramble, but the end result turned out great and was highly featured!

Digital Painting Portraits

An assortment of caricatures and digital paintings of some strangers online. All done with tablet and Photoshop.

The Mysterious Island Map

Here was a piece I was particularly proud of. A map design that I pitched for “The Mysterious Island” wherein three different maps were combined to make one single map. It was my idea to have all three maps use the compass rose as the fulcrum and then the strokes and letters would align to form one single map. It ended up being featured heavily, and even made the trailer and credits!