Friday, March 26, 2010

Sega-16 Interview


Here's an interview I did recently with Ken Horowitz at Sega-16, a website dedicated to documenting the history of the old Sega Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X video game consoles and the games made for them. You can read it here.

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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Disney "Parachutes" TV Ad


Pencil Test Studios, the new animation house I opened with Ed Schofield (mentioned below), recently finished work on a commercial for Disneyland Paris. It was a fun project, combining live action, CG and hand drawn animation all to great effect. The main production company was Motion Theory, who directed the spot and handled the very challenging compositing work. The hand drawn animation was provided by Duck Studios and we handled all the animation of Woody and Buzz. All the other CG Pixar characters were created by pulling existing animation from Pixar films and compositing them into the spot.

We don't have the spot up on the Pencil Test Studios site yet, but Motion Theory just posted it on theirs. You can check it out here.

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Thursday, March 18, 2010

Pencil Test Studios


Ed Schofield and I recently opened a new animation shop, Pencil Test Studios, located in sunny Irvine, California. Ed and I have worked together on and off for years now, collaborating on numerous projects like Aladdin, Earthworm Jim, the Neverhood, Koghead and Meatus, The PJ's, and many many more. Ed's an extraordinary animator who keeps a low profile and as a result never gets the credit he deserves. Trust me though, he's a workhorse and is the backbone of any project he works on.

So far PTS has completed contract work on a couple game projects as well as two TV commercials for Disney featuring Pixar's Buzz and Woody from Toy Story. We're also working on an iPhone game and an animated short, both slated for release later this year.

You can check out some of our work here and read our latest press release here.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The Making of Earthworm Jim

As a follow up to last week's EWJ post, here are some scans from an old Sega book that included a section on the making of the first Earthworm Jim game. There's also a lot of concept art from other Sega games of that period, including Eternal Champions and Jurassic Park. As far as I know it's out of print, but used copies are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere.





























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Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Earthworm Jim Sketchbook Pages

Recently I've had several requests from video game journalists, students, fans, etc. for development art from the old Earthworm Jim games, so here's a big batch of pages from some dusty old sketchbooks. Enjoy.





























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