Getting In Character

The last couple of days my designs have been mostly with licensed characters. Disney stuff (Pooh and Tigger, Tinkerbell, the Princesses, Mickey and Minnie), Pixar's Cars, Dreamwork's Madagascar, and entirely too much Scooby-Doo. What started out as 2 possible product art requests for Scooby have ended up being 6 final products because the product manager liked ALL of my concepts. D'oh! We ended up narrowing it down a bit so I'm only doing 6 of the batch of ideas I submitted to our creative manager. Yay.

After having to read through the Pixar Car's styleguide to make sure I followed requirements and knew the characters, now I know what the movie is supposed to be about. Darn it. Nice story! Not quite what I expected based on the trailers, but definitely much better than the NASCAR feature I was afraid it would be about. I'm sad, though, that I won't have the total surprise when I finally get to see the actual movie at the theater since I pretty much know what's going to happen. Still really looking forward to it, though. For all that it's a movie about cars. ha.

I mentioned a report that I read from Animated-News to the Product Managers about all of the upcoming feature animations that have penguins in them: Madagascar, Happy Feet, and Surf's Up; plus there's a new short that's supposed to be with the four penguins from Madagascar when the DVD comes out. Our creative manager and one of the senior artists got to take a look at some of the animation from Happy Feet when they were at Warner Bro's last month. Sounds like it could be a cute and fun film. Although I don't know how well Elijah Wood will be as the penguin's voice. Anyways, looks like we'll be doing alot of penguin stuff in the next year. Glad I like penguins. :)

Looks like we might be adding in a bit of Wallace and Gromit. I mentioned the movie to our Product Managers and they weren't aware that it was in development (say what?!?). That could be fun to create some Halloween products for. Couple of my favorite characters. Yup. I could use a Gromit.

We're meeting this weekend to do some more work on our animation short. I'm so looking forward to getting working on that, even when it's one small step at a time. It's still progress and we're learning from the experience. Plus, it's what I want to do. I have some more character art clean-up I want to do before the meeting, so it's a good thing that it won't be till Sunday. Was going to be Saturday, but then SJ said she was going with her friends from work to the Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival. She's been wanting to go for a while. My sister and her husband are part of the court there. Funny.