Years ago, I was asked to develop and idea for series of skateboard wheels that were targeted toward the younger set. I was given the name Wild Hares, and decided to give it a very Warner Brothers style.
After I was given multiple wheels for the artwork to be printed on, I tried to get a little more elaborate. We were permitted only 4 colors on these, so, off the bat, I knew I'd go with a green and orange 'carrot color scheme.
The narrative I'd come up with dealt with a rabbit that had eaten radioactive carrots, and became the 'Wild Hare' From there, a cat and mouse story evolved featuring a farmer named 'Annie' who employed increasingly brutal, militaristc methods of dealing with the Wild Hare:
After about 2 years and about 10 or so wheel graphics and clothing had come out, Wild Hares was discontinued. It was a one of the funner projects I'd had a chance to work on, and great lesson in graphic identity and marketing.
About 8 years ago, I produced a show called Hip Hop Massive, and, on a weekly basis, we updated a website full of content. Everything from interviews, to mixes, anything relating to a weekly guest.
We had the mighty DJ QBert on one week, and, we knew he was a huge Atari fan, so, I put together a Flash game for him based on his mascot, Scratchy Seal (a seal puppet he wears on his hand which should demonstrate his insane silliness). So, I layed out a few 2600 style, 8-Bit, frames of artwork, and rigged some simple coding, and was left with this.
James
BTW there are 3 levels to this game. Whoever out there can get past the third level (and send me a screenshot), a free Simpsons Season 10 DVD will be yours.
Personally one of my favorite documentaries. And after watching this for a second time, I had to open up my MacMame version, and play a couple of rounds.
It's not quite as hard as the nerds in the movie make it sound, but, it's a time sucker for sure.
And the crazy thing is, this guy made a version of the game in Flash!
A new project that's in the works is requiring a revisiting of a lot of Sterankos work. He made his mark in the late 60's with his Marvel work. Most notably SHIELD, which was their James Bond style character. Sterankos work introduced psychedelic imagery to the comics world like no one else had. You can tell he was referencing Filmore posters that were being done at the time.
The best part is, he was also an author, a magician, jazz guitarist and would later go on to contribute conceptual design to Spielberg and Coppola, who were huge fans.
He also has to be one of the slickest dressed of any of the former Marvel guys I've ever seen.
Some of the earliest musings of characters from Advance Knight. Imaginings of GZA and RZA here. Prince Rakeem's (RZA) character was meant to be a whiz kid, dj, tech guy carrying his gear on his back:
As a young kid I really REALLY loved Gatchaman, which was known to us 10 years olds on American TV as Battle Of The Planets. They even added a funny robot named Seven Zark Seven for comedy relief. Nevertheless, I never missed an episode, and watching this amazing design and animation would spur me to draw endlessly. I just came across some of that artwork:
After a month or so, most of the ideas started to gel. The storyboards I presented involved Quasimoto (though, the little yellow character we were animating wasn't truly Quasimoto. Quas was supposed to be 'the unseen', and for the most part, no one knew who this yellow guys was, but anyways...) and he was being abducted into a graffiti piece by the evil Lord Inamel. Inamel was a character that was supposed to represent what i saw as the blatant bloated ego involved in most street art. Especially in that street art employs so many strict rules. The arm band was supposed to signify this 'fascist' trait.
I also wanted the video to play as my 'love letter' to graffiti art. A part of my own past that I've always cherished. The world we were creating here was a sort of 'land of graffiti', in which names of all of the legendary graffiti artists stood on rolling hills. You'll see Vamm, Dondi, Taki 183, Blade etc all placed in there one way or another. One thing I'd wanted to be mindful of this project was also my color palette. As the video progresses, I wanted the colors to get darker and darker, until we find ourselves in Inamels evil lair.
On a handful of shots, I was hoping to have some 3D camera moves. The problem was I was using some pretty primitive software for the shots. I literally would spec the scene objects out, then trace them frame by frame to give them the hand drawn look. The results were mixed, but it gave the video a bit of dimension and depth.
I started to composite all of these separate elements, which was a pretty daunting task. So many pieces need to be laid out, and work together. Plus, I was assigning a bit of a blur to all of them to take some of the 'vector' edge off of everything (since most of them were created in Flash and Illustrator). Another method I was trying out was assigning textures to animated vector elements (importing pixel patterns and imagery into vector animations):
After about 5 months, I finally had something to present to the label. Egon was pretty happy. It was somewhat incomplete, s the original treatment had Quas getting actually sucked into the wall, whereas this version started with him in the vortex at the beginning. 4 months later, I finally delivered the video with complete intro. It was probably one of my most ambitious videos (though, I always thought I could have made it way better), and something I've always been proud of.
