The Cat Piano

I just had the pleasure of seeing The Cat Piano. It's a really great animated short I sagest if you haven't seen it you should. Check out the video below.

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

For more Info about The Cat Piano and other projects by PDA the studio that created the film. Check out the links below.
http://catpianofilm.com/
http://www.thepra.com.au/

Turtles Forever Coming Theaters

This piece was done for a canceled Fathom event. It was worked on by all of the art staff and done in a crunch. we essentially finished this in 2 days. I wound up staying till 2am doing the composite you see here. Though this version was not what was finally used, I still thought you guys should see it.

GOD SLAYER!!!

Turtles Forever Poster

Hey guys it's been a wile, I had this post in my draft section for a wile now just waiting for the right time to post. I would of posted this earlier but I had no idea that the poster had been released. In fact I found it on line by accident on none other than Peter Laird's Blog.

Sorry I haven't updated this blog in a wile But I have been very busy with our current Project, A little something called Turtles Forever. Turtles Forever is our first Direct to DVD feature length movie. The DTDVD Follows the current TMNT as they confront a foe so huge it takes more than just one team of turtles to defeat it.
In posts to come I will be doing some behind the scenes segments that will give you an idea of the insane amount of work that went in to the creation of Turtles Forever. And with out further a due here's the first post :)

So let me set this up. The makings of this piece started way back in December around the time of the NY Comic Con. We were hitting the tail end of pre-production and "Lloyd Goldfine"  our supervising producer and director was worried that there might not be enough budget to pay for a poster. So I initially volunteered to do this piece for absolutely no extra pay. It was to be done on my own off time. It was due around the time of San Diago comic con.
The day of our Turtle retrospective at NYCC I had about 3 ideas for the poster. Lloyd and I agreed we wanted to keep the poster a bit mysterious not giving away two much of the final story of the film. Here are a couple of my original thumbnails.

This one Is what I call My Star Wars TMNT poster. Its very inspired by Drew Struzan's work and I planned to do it in a very painterly style. Something like my Ninja Tribunal Cover.

This second one is essentially what became the final poster. My inspiration for this was originally the Transformers the movie cover, but later it evolved in to something more. Originally I planned to have silhouettes of Bebop & Rocksteady in the for ground on the left an right. But that was later changed because I didn't want to clutter up the image with more characters.

The process was a bit slow going at the time. I had a couple of my personal pieces in the works like the piece I submitted to the Udons Darkstalkers Tribute Book. We also had some additional color models requested by Dong Woo (Our animation company). A lot of which were keeping me at work late nights.

A couple months passed and Lloyd needed to show Mirage what we planned for the poster. Here is a cleaned up version with grays and such.
When that was approved I started the final. I planned to do the whole thing in separate parts so that the 4Kids graphics department could edit the image when needed or use elements of it as promotional material. Here are some of the element separated.

Here we have the new Turtle copter with April and Casey and the old turtle blimp. This probably took me the longest out of any element in this poster. Drawing vehicles always takes me a lot of time. also April and Casey are on separate layers.

Here we have the 80's Turtles. I had a lot of fun drawing these guys. I have to say I haven't drawn them since i was a kid. Me and a buddy from elementary school used to always draw and trade drawings of these guys. Believe it or not it was a little hard to keep these guys on model but once i got it I was able to replicate it over and over. It's kind of subtle but if you look at the line art you will notice the line art has a slight brownish tint. That is something we in the color department came up with. All the characters from the 80's show have this line treatment in the film. To give them a slightly older feel. I will go in to more detail in a later post.

Next we have Tokka and Rahzar, yup they are in the movie :). the reason they are here is I didn't want to have two much 80's characters or 03 characters.

Finally we have the 03 turtles. you will notice they aren't the Back to the sewers versions of the turtles with eyes. The FF turtles were going to be used for BTTS but for property unity they were redesigned to reflect the current movie. These are slightly adjusted versions of the Fast Forward turtles. the main adjustment being their outfits and the rendering of the shadows. I will go in to a little more detail in a later post.

And here is the Final Image I submitted with out text

I finished this piece before Comic con an the first sneek screening for the Film unfortunately final text and such were not finished in time for printing. This image in the end was a massive undertaking I pulled more all nighters than I should of but I'm really happy with the final product. Even though I didn't get paid for this I consider this the least i could do for a property that has given me so much in my carrier. Happy 25th!!