WORK CARICATURES: THE LONG GONE DAYS OF THE STORY MEETING

Times have changed. The normal story meeting, where the storyboard artists would meet with directors/producers to discuss storytelling issues that come up along the movie making process and try as a group to find creative solutions is long gone.  Rarely does the team get together for those marathon sessions, locked in a conference room, hashing out what the characters want, or don't want, or could want or how tall they are or if it would be a better story if the character were to be a girl instead of a boy.
When you'd find yourself in those meetings, the room full of artists would inevitably grab pens and paper and start sketching everyone else in the room.  I recently found some of my favorite sketches from a number of years ago.  Whether you recognize anyone or not, it's always fun to try and simplify people you know down to a quick few lines and see what you get.  Heeheeheehee...

THE ART OF TURBO: OR AT LEAST SOME STORYBOARDS I DREW...

It's time to find out what happens when an ordinary garden snail enters the Indy 500!  Turbo is in theaters!  I worked on it for about a year.  It was a labor of love for director David Soren, and he had the amazing talents of folks like Shannon Tindle, Rich Daskas, Andy Schuhler, Toby Shelton, Sharon Bridgeman Lukic among many others to help him realize his personal little story come to life the big screen.  It's bright, fast, funny, bizzare and has snails that look like the coolest Muppets never made.

These boards were from a sequence I worked on where Turbo, is being outfitted for the race by the human shopkeepers who have put all of their businesses on the line in the hopes of scoring big with Turbo's win at the Indy.  I was tasked with finding ways that each of the humans could add something personal to help Turbo achieve his goal. I wanted to start the sequence out abstractly, with seemingly disconnected images of a treadmill, a hairdryer, and a car interior, so you were a bit unsure of what was going on, until it was revealed as means to test Turbo's new found speed and to see what adjustments would be needed to help him race.

 Here's part 1. (-first panel drawn by Sharon Bridgeman Lukic)