The Batman: Season 4 Finale

Apologies...It's been a long time since I've posted. Unfortunately, I have not had time to draw anything new that I can post, but I will let you in how sometimes things have to change on the fly.

For the Season 4 two-part finale of The Batman, we had to show quite a bit of Wayne Industries, a location that had been designed for a previous season. Since we were spending so much time there, I had to make sure it looked like the headquarters of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. So, I took the basic layouts from the original designs and did some remodeling.

I wish I had those originals handy for comparison along with the Wayne Industries logo, which was basically two V's shaped and placed side-by-side to create an I in the negative space between them. The first sketch, the front view, features the main tower with that "W" logo. That domed shape in the right foreground was one of the main areas of interest, where the aliens would begin manufacturing their war machines, or so I thought.

Towards the end of a season, the design team is dealing with designing off scripts, key layouts from storyboards and late additions for episodes coming back. So, it's not unusual for things to get a bit behind, especially on a detailed action show like this. Add to that continuing script changes, and you can see how changes on the fly can become unavoidable.

From the second sketch, it's clear that the space has been fairly resolved. I had done a series of interior shots to match the exterior shapes. Then the prop designs for the weapons of destruction started coming in. There were much larger that initially anticipated and the script called for more of them than expected. So, I had to throw together the second pass on a warehouse space to accommodate them. The third sketch shows the new space with some scale references in front. The airplane is a 747, which is a very large vehicle. They are on Post-Its because even the scale of this new one had to undergo several changes.

The fourth sketch shows the aerial view of the Wayne campus, the view with which I'd started the entire remodeling. The new warehouse/assembly line is in faint red towards the back. While this particular view was never cleaned up, as it didn't turn out to be needed from the way the scenes were boarded, it helped inform the changes I had to make to the already cleaned-up front view. As if things weren't tight enough on the schedule, I had to start on my next job, so a few interior details were completed serving split duty.

Not the most traumatic on the fly changes I've had to deal with, but they did require some juggling of time and quick thinking to minimize the work required to accommodate those revisions. I have yet to see the final results, as aired a while back. One of these days I hope to catch them on a rerun.

Hyped: Music Video

Starting with some live footage that just wasn't working and splicing in some stills, behind-the-scenes video and my drawing, the bulk of this music video was put together basically in a few days under the gun. I think it's supposed to air on the MTV-Korea channel through DirectTV. I hope you enjoy the end result of a couple sleepless nights.


To view directly on YouTube click here. Also, check out my friends' Woody Pak & Gloria Lee's label Chaos Theory Music.

Hyped: Music Video Drawing

Here's a series of images showing my progress with some animated clips (very limited animation with photoshop layers) for my friend Woody's music video. He's launched a new label Chaos Theory Music and it's been well-received so far with some attention from news and radio outlets. The song is called "Hyped" which explains all the "Hype" signs everywhere. Pardon my limited color application. The drawing was conceived and excuted on a very short schedule. I hope the video editor can work some magic with it.

The song's about the good and bad of hype, so I thought I'd say my two cents about how hype with all it's flash can make the rest of the world seem a dull grey. The left side of the drawing definitely resorts to some cliche shorthand for West Coast with the palms and lights into the sky, but some of you Midwesterners might recognize the Sears Tower as you pan right and hidden under the large "HYPE" sign on the right is an approximation of the Empire State Building. Had I more time, I would have fleshed out the morning sky panel with full colors to let people know when the lights turn off and the sun comes up all the full colors start to come out. Alas, time has not allowed me to complete the thought. I hope you enjoy the drawings anyway.

Basketball Shoes, Manta Rays & Basking Sharks

Sometimes I am able to draw things that actually animate (props and, on rare occasions, characters). Here's some models for Dack's spacecraft from "Men in Black: The Series" season two when Kay and Jay travel to space station. I also designed a cockpit-shifting landing configuration that turned out to be unused because we only see the ship docked to the space station. The original idea started out resembling a basketball shoe and somehow ended up here.

The larger scale, flying wing type plane is a ridiculously large ship (I estimated the wingspan as needing to be over 1000 feet) from the CGI modeled "Max Steel". The premise of the show was a giant plane that flew within an artificially generated cloud and literally swallowed other, high-tech aircraft. I didn't end up finishing out the open dock sequence, but the concept was based on some photos I'd seen of basking sharks and manta rays. I had to logic out the faux aerodynamics of having a giant scoop in front. So, I envisioned the backside venting open like a basking shark's gills open up to allow water flow through its gaping mouth.

It's nice to be able to design different things sometimes, but it made me appreciate the difficulty of balancing shapes, design with what can animate well, not that I ever really got a sense of how well they translated onto screen, but it was fun trying.

The Batman: Season Four: Main Title

With the addition of Robin for the fourth season, the powers that be decided it was time to include him in the main title sequence. So, they had me crank out this upshot to eye level pan of some Gotham City buildings. Considering the quick turnaround, I was pretty happy with the results. The colors add a lot to the mood of the piece. The line art was also used for the long sleeve crew shirt (white and grey lines over black) to go along with the orange prisoner in Arkham Asylum short sleeve.

It's been a long time since they've aired those Season Four episodes. The last new one I saw was the sixth one, "The Breakout" which was a play on that stuck inside the Police station film with Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne. I believe the seventh one is the much anticipated future Gotham City episode that features Nightwing, Oracle and a Mr. Freeze with heavy prosthetics, not to mention a sweet Bat Tank designed by Byron Penaranda, our lead Prop Designer. According to the schedule, it will air Saturday, February 3, 2007 at the same Bat Time on the same Bat Channel.

I hope you all enjoy it! (BTW, the character models are there for color reference, not to try out Robin's new utility belt of levitation, that sounds like a WoW auction item...can we say addiction? 8`P).

Teen Titans: Season 2: Underground

One thing universal among all the "Teen Titans" fans I've encountered was a disdain for Terra. Young and old viewers alike maintain a very strong reaction to her betrayal of the team, even post redemptive season two finale. During her introductory season, the Titan's Tower slowly sinks into an implausibly giant hole underground.

My job as the designer was to make this technological feat look at least passably possible. To cover the enormous space involved I drew this cutaway view, which does tweak the scale a little to keep it manageable for the storyboard artists to stage.

It all worked out well enough, but the overseas studio animating the show didn't get that the view was a cutaway and drew the ceiling exactly as I drew it (click here and view image 146.jpg: special thanks to Titans Go for the shot). I probably should have made a clear note on the design.

Even with such extra effort to make everything clear, something always gets lost or altered in translation. Sometimes the changes can be for the better, but more often, the work suffers. Once it's out of your hands, all you can do is hope the damage is minimal and barely noticed like this instance.

Teen Titans: Prom Ship

So, one of the more fun and quintessential Glen Murakami "Teen Titans" ideas was that a villain, the ever dangerous Killer Moth, is threating to destroy the city, if Robin doesn't agree to take his teenage daughter to prom. As it turned out, she was only trying to make her spider-headed boyfriend jealous. Another fun part of "Titans" was trying to revive the most obscure characters in DC Comics' along with the numerous insertions of names from the crew.

I designed this prom ship as a prop and BG, and at the time, it seemed to made sense to draw the whole ship in detail. As I went along, the drawing got bigger and bigger. I think the final drawing was about 3 feet wide and 18 inches tall. Fortunately, I still had some animation pan paper, so I was able to avoid dodging tape seams for the long continous lines for the hull and deck.

As you can see, most of the action took place in the front deck, decorated with tables complete with moon and star balloons. The moons and stars were an allusion to the theme for the wedding invitations I designed for my friend, Chap Yaep, a director and storyboard artist on various shows I'd worked on, including "Teen Titans" and "The Batman". That, in turn, was alluding to a time, when Chap and his wife were dating and occasionally he'd sleep over instead of driving back home (50 miles from the office).

One of the letters, his then girlfriend (and now wife) wrote was filled with silvery confetti shaped like, you guessed it, moons and stars. Unaware of the letter's loose contents, Chap tore open the letter (as any enthusiastic member of a couple should) spilling the moons and stars all over the floor. Even after vacuuming up most of it, for years, I would occasionally find something clinging to the bottom of my foot and chuckle when it was one of those very moons or stars.

Perhaps, I haven't said much for my vacuuming skills (and probably not much about drawing either), but it's just funny how the littlest details and filter through years in your life and somehow find their way onto a nationally broadcast television show. Though I doubt anyone could have made the connection, save Chap and his wife (I can't recall if they did), I think it's those little things that not only make the drawing process fun, but add the layers of thought put into any labor of love that shine through directly and indirectly in the craftsmanship.

BTW, the ship's name is and ode to one of the show's longtime directors, Matt Youngberg.

Teen Titans: Season Three: Tamaranian Palace

This is the Tamaranian Palace from "Bethrothed", Season Three. I'll see if I can get my hands on the colored version, so I can post that along with the incredible space shots Chu-Hui Song colored for the episode. Early on, I figured out that a dual sun or moon was easy shorthand for making the viewer aware of an alien setting, since of course, we only have one of each.

The design began as sort of a blend of Lawrence Alma-Tadema's "Spring" and Moebius, who's drawings always have hints of being alien and really ancient. "Spring" was really more for its festive mood and tone reflective of the emotional makeup of Starfire's people, because the Classic architecture is probably too staid and stoic.

Looking over the drawing now, it really bears little resemblance to the original inspirations, which is just as well, since I do't think I could have done either justice. I don't recall any design discussion of how stark the terrain should be, but I think that was necessitated more by the script calling for a precipitous drop to one side of the palace where a fleet of potentially hostile battle crafts was parked.

Something always bothered me about this drawing, and I think I finally see it. There are too many parallels along the stone walkway. Glen would always emphasize that parallels should be avoided unless you really need it. Especially in what should look more organic, those parallels make what was intended to look natural seem less so. Fortunately, color works like love on our drawings and covers over a multitude of mistakes like that.

'Nuff Said

Your results: You are Spider-Man

• Spider-Man: 85%
  
• Robin: 80%
  
• Superman: 70%
  
• Iron Man: 70%
  
• The Flash: 60%
  
• Supergirl: 55%
  
• Hulk: 55%
  
• Green Lantern: 40%
  
• Wonder Woman: 35%
  
• Batman: 35%
  
• Catwoman: 15%
  

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.




Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz




Your results: You are Dr. Doom

• Dr. Doom: 74%
  
• Juggernaut: 69%
  
• Mr. Freeze: 67%
  
• Apocalypse: 66%
  
• Mystique: 61%
  
• Lex Luthor: 59%
  
• Dark Phoenix: 57%
  
• Venom: 52%
  
• The Joker: 47%
  
• Magneto: 41%
  
• Green Goblin: 37%
  
• Kingpin: 37%
  
• Riddler: 32%
  
• Poison Ivy: 32%
  
• Catwoman: 28%
  
• Two-Face: 25%
  

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.




Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Quiz

Teen Titans: Season One: Colored BGs

Here's three colored backgrounds from "Teen Titans" Season One. The Ops Room is a stock model where the Titans spend most of their time inside the T-Tower. The jungle scene was from the Mad Mod episode when they think there's a way out of his classroom prison. It appeared again in the second Control Freak episode (the popular among my friends, "Hakjoon Kang" chant episode). Finally, Rancid City is the city under the influence of Johnny Rancid. All of my line art was beautifully rendered by the background color crew, which at the time consisted of Chu-Hui Song and Kersti Myberg.

The Rancid City was drawn with shadow and texture using a technique I discovered in second grade when I colored The Great Pyramids over a rough surface to give it a rougher grain than the paper provided. All the textures you see in the other pieces were digitally rendered in by the colorists. Chu-Hui actually spent quite a bit of time generating the brushes from a series of paint strokes on hot press illustration board.

Glen Murakami and Eric Canete recently dropped by the new office, and Glen mentioned how he'd watched one of his (and my) favorites Tadahiro Uesugi do his very undigital looking digital paintings. His art was one of the stronger influences on Glen's art direction for "Teen Titans" Apparently, Uesugi also makes custom brushes in Photoshop, but he does it digitally. If I heard Glen correctly, Uesugi makes unique brushes for each piece and then takes those brushes to do a value composition that he refines and eventually gives an overall hue. He then takes parts of the piece and futher distinguishes the colors from there. I could never have guessed that approach from what I've seen, but you can't argue with the beautiful results.

The Batman Season 4: Waggie Time Dog Food Factory

This drawing was pretty large (24"X36") and suffered a bit from a shoddy tape job using standard leger sized paper (11"X17"). As is often the case with drawing, the inked version didn't turn out quite as I'd imagined. I still like the rough enough to post it. In the episode, the Joker is thwarted from poisoning the large mixing vats.

Men in Black: Santa's Workshop

Okay, so this post is a couple days late, but I thought you might want to check out Men in Black: The Series's take on where all the gifts came from, namely, a basement workshop run by aliens.

The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot: Promo

An unused promo piece with shadow guide for "The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot". Too bad there are so many episodes that fell to a similar fate.

Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo

Since this has aired on TV already, I hope it's okay to post some of the art from our pre-production design. I don't know why it's taking so long for the DVD to come out, but I hope it's because they are adding some nice extras to it. Enjoy.

The Batman Season 4: Ice Pick Club

It's been far too long since my last post. Here are some season 4 episode 1 "A Matter of Family" designs for the Ice Pick Club, an out of plain sight hangout for Gotham's underworld.

The Batman: Season 4: Comic Con Preview

For those of you who missed this San Diego Comicbook Convention preview:



Or you can watch from the YouTube site by clicking here.

Teen Titans: Beast Boy's Hakjoon Chant

For those of you who keep asking me to show you this clip...



For more information on the episode check out TitansGo.net.

The Animation Process

Here's a document I stumbled upon at work. I can't figure out the source and some of the information might not be 100% accurate, but still it's a good primer for those interested in joining our ranks or if you're just curious.

Most half hour animated series (which range from 20-22 minutes of running time) take from 8-12 months to produce from start to finish, from story outline to finished product that's ready for airing on TV.

Sorry, they are just scans of the document. If I had OCR, I would have converted the file to selectable text. Feel free to post any questions, and I'll try to answer them as best as I can.

Teen Titans: Tokyo DVD Trailer

There's a "Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo" trailer available online. You can view it as an mpeg or wmv. The DVD is set to release in the fall sometime. The complete season 2 DVD set is coming out September 26th. Here's more info on that. And finally, the Teen Titans video game for PS2 comes out June 25th. Here's the listing on Amazon.com. We got to play a little bit of it when one of the developers visited WB a longer while back, and the parts we saw were pretty nice and very faithful to the show's designs. I hope you enjoy!

Special thanks to Titans Go for making me aware of all this.

NewSong: Noah's Place

This was done in one of those drawing moments where things just flow (a phrase coined by an instructor at my school while I was there). It must have taken just over 2 hours from start to finish, but it seemed about 15 mintues, one of those "spots of time" Norman Maclean (another distinguished instructor from my school) mentions in one of my favorite books, "A River Runs Through It".

I'll leave you to explore (and hopefully enjoy) the multiple narratives I've attempted to weave into the drawing, but my two favorites are, first, the homage to Pablo, the penguin that hated the cold, from one of my favorite childhood books (crossed with my memory of Tennessee Tuxedo sans Chumley the Walrus). Next, the lobster who is annoyed that the PlayStation controllers are not claw-friendly.

The oxpecker posed rhino is actually Noah, whose place this is. Noah's Place is also where the kids go at NewSong Irvine.

SD Macross: GERWALK Mode

Like most my age, getting home from school early enough to catch "Robotech" was a weekday essential. I would only later discover that the three series were actually unrelated with the first one being titled "Super Dimension Fortress Macross" and the favorite of most, including myself. The latter incarnations "Macross Plus" and "Macross Zero" were all beautifully designed and animated, but I've still always had a soft spot for the Lynn Minmay, Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes love triangle along with the Veritech Fighter.

My renditions of the Super Deformed GERWALK (Guardian) mode of the Veritech are from deep in the archive. Did you know that GERWALK actually had a meaning behind it?

The original line art for these two drawings were obviously copied from the Robotech books I'd acquired over the years, but they do mark my introductions to two techniques I'd never really noticed. The marker rendering (if you can really even call it that) came after several 1987 high school field trips i took with Jeff to the art departments at University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University, my introduction to product design and marker drawings. It began this entire journey of wanting to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, where many of my current colleagues got their art education (a lot of them in product/automotive design). I never did make it to art school, settling for some art classes at University of Chicago (which is known more for things other than their art department) while concentrating my studies on physics and then philosophy.

The bitmapped one was from my first year in college (1989) and my first real introduction to computer art and MacPaint. If you can believe it, this was done drawing with the mouse on my Macintosh SE/20 (can you believe we got by in those days with a 20 MB harddrive? but then again Microsoft Word fit on a 800 KB floppy). The output was on my HP DeskWriter ink jet printer, my first time having 300 dpi output at home (well actually at my dorm), but you can tell it's pre-ink jet paper era. Silicon Beach's SuperPaint 2.0 would later introduce me to object oriented drawing, which was crucial to understanding Aldus PageMaker which revolutionized DTP (Desktop Publishing) and a few years later Adobe Illustrator, which I still use all the time.

Now, I never really developed my marker skills nor did I really delve into the possibilities of pixel art, as some graphic designers have wonderfully done lately, but it is always interesting to be able to dig up pieces from the past that so clearly mark important times in the learning process. It's even more interesting that they share a Robotech theme, as the show itself (on a larger scale beyond the personal dramas) was about the introduction of new people, technologies and energy sources (Protoculture) and how it altered the course of human history.

I'm thankful for all those who have taught me, influenced my art and introduced me to new tools or techniques along the way and those who continue to do so. While I'd like to share Robert Frost's confidence that my decision to pursue art has made all the difference, I know that it's these people who help fill in the gaps of my understanding and knowledge who have even made a choice possible. Thank you all!

Super Mario Live

For those of you who were, like me, reared in part by that cadre of characters (click on the "marioworld.png" link) from the genius mind of Shigeru Miyamoto, I thought you might appreciate this:



or if you prefer to watch on YouTube directly: click here.

Basement: 19 April 2006

My friend and fellow WB Animation employee, Eric Canete, has been doing a series of 90 minute drawings on his blog, Discard. I was already impressed and amazed by what he's posted, but after trying to do the same, I'm even more astonished at the quality and polish on his posts. My drawing took two roughs and twice the time Eric has been allotting himself, yet is no where near as finished looking. I've got to draw more!

For those of you keen-eyed viewers, yes, that is C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) coming out of the man hole.

Time Lapse: 5 April 2006

My first "film". Not the most professionally done time lapse, but it was fun trying. It was shot manually using a compact digital camera on a tripod. Like most cameras in that category, there are very few manually adjustable functions, so that would explain the color shifts and inconsistent focusing. Still, I think those automatic functions added to the overall effect.

Sorry, it takes a while to load, but did you notice the bird flying past my window? I can see why they film with water on the streets. It's much more cinematic with the reflections. Since I wasn't about to spray the street, I was fortunate to have woken up early enough on a rainy morning.



Here's a direct link, since the imbedded players seem to be a bit slower.

NewSong: H2O

These are some t-shirt designs I did for NewSong a couple of Easters ago. The second one was a bit more clever in it's use of the letters, but they opted for the first one which is visually more of an immediate read. Being the geek that I am, I actually looked up the bond angle for the water molecule which, in case you don't want to hit the link, is 104.5 degrees.

As anyone who has made ice before knows, water expands as it freezes. The reason for this (as the article link explains, with visual aids) is that the organized lattice structure of its solid form creates "space" through the weaker hydrogen bonds that occur between the H2O molecules. In liquid form, the v-shaped units mingle and tangle up a lot closer to each other. It's somewhat analogous to a steel bridge with those X-shaped or V-shaped supports versus just a random pile of those same girders.

So, you may ask, "Why do you bring this up Mr. Chemistry/Engineering Geek?" (Actually, I was never too keen on Chem and never studied Engineering.) I just thought they are good reminders for me to embrace more structure in my life, a constant uphill struggle for as long as I recall. Like many artists and slobs, I tend to view structure as being restricting and confining.

However, if you imagine a girder bridge, it's obvious that one with those X's and V's organized into a structure allows space to go through it, poke your head out crossing it, climb it and (for the more moribidly-oriented) even jump off it. Now, if those girders were not so organized, not only would the bridge be more difficult to navigate, but I wouldn't have much confidence in the strength of the bridge to hold up under the strain of any additional weight.