Mecha Drill!

So hopefully you've seen The Boxtrolls by now. If not I guess this is a little bit of a spoiler. Michel and Tom worked on this guy for quite some time before the story dictated what the final design needed to be. Eventually I got to mess around with it too and came up with this turnaround - it's these drawings they used to build from. Definitely not the best turnaround from a technical standpoint but this was a pretty difficult task.

At one point the drill was even a mechanized version of a rat - Snatcher had a pet rat that would pilot it. In the end it's more like a demented, horrific boxtroll with fire coming from its mouth.

Working with the team on this was insanely rewarding. So many different departments had to come together to make this thing happen. It might be a fool's errand to call out the people who helped build this but I'd like to try:

Curt Enderle, Raul Martinez, Ollie Jones, Jerry Svoboda, Brian Hanh, Matt Burlingame, Paul Mack, Tim Arp, Molly Light, Tony Chen, Mike Possert, Enrico Altmann, Leigh Jacob, George Willis, Max Barsana, Enrico Altmann, and Bruce Bowman... hats off to you guys! Everyone should be proud of their work.

The real thing is as huge! Definitely comparable to a person when its legs are extended... and definitely too heavy for a single person to lift. But if that still interests you, it'd make a really good conversation starter in your living room.

Cheese Guild

Trying to apply the same design philosophy to a building that you do to a character takes some doing. I was tasked with finalizing the concepts that Michel Breton and Tom McClure worked out for the centerpiece of Cheesebridge, the Cheese Guild. This is what I came up with. Michel had an interesting way of tipping horizontal lines and creating a rhythm in the buildings that I wanted to keep as much as possible (as well as the overall feeling of looseness). It's complete with every sort of milk-producing animal. The building in real life is pretty staggeringly huge (I believe it's a fair bit taller than a person?)

A few of us came up with a few pretty great puns to put on the guild itself, though I believe in the end it just says Cheesum Gildam. I'll update this post if I can remember what the alternates were.

Sir Langsdale

The aristocrats were a great deal of fun to work on. They were pretty pushed and extremely elaborate. The costume department really pulled out all the stops on the final puppets.

Herbert

Herbert isn't in The Boxtrolls for a long amount of time, but sometimes that means you can have more fun with that character. He's definitely one of the more extreme cases of a character in a Laika film. At one point we were debating whether or not he'd have animatable hair. We finally figured that all the oil in his hair would just make it hold it shape after all the years he spent upside down.

We were also careful to use the same color scheme for Eggs and Herbert. Color harmony between characters is pretty important stuff.

Mr. Gristle

Mr. Gristle was a pretty important character. He was the first character to get approved through all the steps (design, sculpt, puppet, maquette, etc). We learned a lot about how to capture the looseness of the style in a human forum. In the end though, he was cut from the film as his personality became redundant with Crabs, the old name of what is now Mr. Gristle in the film. To add to the confusion, we more or less used his face for Sir Broderick the White Hat in the film. A lot can happen to the life of a character in a short amount of time.

The process for creating these images was a lot of fun. Head of Costume Deb Cook (no relation) asked me to help her with designing the costumes on the film. We constructed them as paper collages and touched them up with color digitally. Ripping and cutting paper really gave us interesting edges and made the costumes loose and expressive. Debs taught me a lot about the actual construction of a costume - not only does it need to look like it was constructed like a costume would in real life, it needs things like animator access and to be able to hold its shape. She could tell me if something I designed was too difficult to make or animate and we could go from there.

Cowpies

Youngins

Seafaring...

Bi-Cycle...

Had Bicycles on the mind lately...

Mate For Life...

Here's a little something that's been keeping me busy.

Taxi!

Car...

Harder than you'd think...

Photograph...

Some work I did on a graphic novel.

Color Script 1.0

Hi all,

This is my first pass at a color script for the film. It's over-representing the parts in the middle so I'll have to add more panels, plus the colors will go through endless tweaking until I get it to feel just right.

I gotta say it's a fun part of the process!

A Beegee

Joe....

Probably not what he'll look like in the end, but definitely a conceptual starting point.

Another day in Pitchville...

Wait a minute.. what's going on here?

Rockin' it up - Pitch Style

It's the modern-day space explorer's preferred method of travel.

Pitchin' it up...

How did a golf cart get up into space? Just ask the Americans, I guess...

More on the pitch...

What would you do if your best friend was the lower-half of a Grumman Apollo LEM?