Michael Jackson Nerd

7/06/2009 MJ UPDATE!!!!!!!! HOOOLY MOOOOLY !

YES IT IS REAL !!!!!! I AM GOING TO THE MICHAEL JACKSON MEMORIAL AT STAPLES CENTER JULY 7, 2009! Out of the 1,600,000 submissions , I am one of the lucky 8,500 randomly selected to attend! I JUST DROVE THROUGH DODGER STADIUM TO GET MY WRIST BANDS AND TICKETS....WITH BEAT IT BLAAAAIRING THE ENTIRE TIME!! ALL THE LINE WORKERS AND COPS WERE CHEERING! HEE HEEEEEEEE!!! I CAN NOT WAIT!
Now please enjoy my earlier nerd out session below:

Anyone who has known me longer than a day knows I am a Michael Jackson nerd. Specificaly about his work from 1968 to 1987. I am a product of the 80's and remember Motown 25 and the premiere of Thriller fondly. You're not going to see me on Hollywood Blvd crying over his star or anything, but I have always had a great admiration for his craft , passion and work as an entertainer. In a world filled with kids who want and expect everything for nothing , Michael Jackson is the constant reminder of working on , researching and honing ones craft.

Why will no one in entertainment ever match what Michael has done ? This is why: No one in entertainment history has ever or will ever work harder and learn more about their craft than MJ did. When he was 10 years old MJ studied other performers, broke down their process and art , and perfected it! As he grew he started looking outside of his own craft and started to study and incorporate all art. He studied the sculpture of Michaelangelo for the design of a pose. He studied Charlie Chaplin , Buster Keaton , and the great mime Marcel Marseau for the design of movement and silhouette. He studied Gene Kelly and Fred Astair Dance routines relentlessly , getting to the essence of their performances. The reason MJ wore short tight pants and thick bright socks (Motown 25 , Thriller , Beat it) Is because Gene Kelly did that to create a clear silhouette and make the feet the focus of the performance. You can track these bright socks like anchor points for the movement.
Jackson studied Indian Dance , the movement of sports athletes , Sword play and fencing , He studied animation for movement. Michael searched out the best street dancers , found them, and learned most of his moves (Moonwalk , Hits , Glides, etc...) from Bugaloo Shrimp , POPPIN TACO , Poppin Pete, Shabadoo Rank , Creeping Eddie and all the Electric Boogaloos out here in California. That is straight from Kid Flash(Pete Gomez)who was part of it all. Taco and Poppin Pete are seen leaning on either side of MJ in smooth criminal(Moonwalker), and are the first two pop locking prisoners MJ frees from their pillar prisons in Captain EO. AMAZING! AND so much more. THEN MICHAEL APPLIED EVERYTHING HE LEARNED AND HONED IT WITH HARD WORK and tireless experimentation !
It is so easy to brush off accomplishment , craft , and passion like that with all the weird stuff surrounding Michael Jackson. And yes I think it is really weird and sad too. But , man that guy was talented. He knew entertainment like nobodies business.

I was at Disneyland on Thursday , June 25th 2009. I was eating a Dole whip in front of the Tiki Room when someone in the crowd started talking about it. I had to interrupt the person and inquire. The person said: "yeah I just got a text about it." I said "What? Come on." Then other people started getting phone calls and texts. More murmers. Then the guy I asked pulled up a news web page on his phone : " MICHAEL JACKSON DEAD". WHAT ? Now everyone was talking about it. Friends were calling me. Then from all over Disneyland you started to hear people yelling: " Michael Jackson Died!!!"Everyone was talking to everyone else about it. "They need to bring back Captain EO in remembrance"... some woman said.
Then a couple hours later I was sitting in Tomorrowland (home of Captain EO) , when Suddenly the Tomorrowland stage starts to rise and a very distinctive beat starts playing: "So you wanta be startin' somethin' , got to be startin' Somethin'"... People started cheering and running towards the stage. It was NUTS!! Everyone was dancing . Then immediately after that they played Thriller! By this time people were just mobbing the area . It was so surreal.
So here are some MJ doodles....Quick impressions of some of my favorite MJ moments over the years. HEEEE HEEEEEEE ! WHOOOOOOOOO!

CORALINE FACIAL ANIMATION !

After having been a Principal Character Designer on Coraline(see previous post), Henry Selick, knowing I was also an animator, asked me if I might Design , Develop and Test all of the Facial Animation (Expressions, Mouth shapes, Dialogue,Teeth) for every character in the film. How they will emote, and talk and hold their mouths and move their brows from every angle. I WAS ECSTATIC!! I did thousands of drawings designing the MASSIVE library of mouth shapes and expressions, and a SLEW of traditional animation dialogue tests to make sure everything worked just right. Henry wanted something special and I took this task very seriously. I am a huge stop motion fan , so to be involved in this part of the process after having designed many of these guys was a dream come true. My drawings and tests for each character were then translated into 3D and the best stop motion team in the world took what I did and went to town. THEY ARE BRILLIANT ! Here is a VERY , VERY , TINY sample of just some of my facial animation design work.

CORALINE IS IN THEATRES NOW!!!!!

GO SEE IT. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE IT! I am so proud to have been a part of this film and a part of the incredible crew! Below is a tiny sample of just a few of my contributions to Coraline. Thank you to everyone who came to the Coraline panel at GALLERY NUCLEUS to see us all talk about and show our art (some shown below). We were overwhelmed by the turn out and the amazing response. THANK YOU SO MUCH. And a big thanks to Laika for letting this all happen. Read more about Coraline in my previous post,and check these talented fools out: Shannon Tindle , Dan Krall , Chris Appelhans , Jon Klassen , Damon Bard. NOW EVERYONE GO SEE CORALINE!!!!
All materials copyright Laika/Shane Prigmore 2009

CORALINE OPENS FEBRUARY 6th!!!!!!

I will post art soon , but first things first...FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6th- CORALINE OPENS IN THEATERS EVERYWHERE! Back in 2006 Henry Selick invited a group of us to join the team that would Create LAIKA Studio's first feature film , CORALINE.We Immediately knew this was special. The film and the studio took risks! The team Henry compiled was not to be believed , and I was honored to be a part of it. Shannon Tindle , Dan Krall, and Myself , would be responsible for the FINAL CHARACTER DESIGN in the film. (Kent Melton and Chris Butler had much to do with the final stages of Other Mother as well). After having designed so many of the characters in the film, I was then asked by Henry to continue to design and develop the Facial Animation (expressions and dialogue) for the head replacements of every character in the film, even producing many 2D animation tests along the way. The BEST stop motion team in history took what I did and went to town! (Below are some I worked with closely)More of the Coraline team I worked with closely,(most of who's work sadly can not be seen in any book) include...
-VIS DEV :Dan Krall, Shannon Tindle, Chris Appelhans, Jon Klassen, Andy Schuhler, Stef Choi
-SCULPTORS : Kent Melton, Damon Bard, Leo Rijn, Tony Merrithew, Scott Foster
-STORY: Chris Butler, Andy Schuhler, Vera Brosgol, Graham Annable, Mike Cachuela , Ovi Nedelcu
-MODEL BUILDERS: Mike Murnane , Charlie Daniels , Fon Davis
-PUPPET FABRICATION: Georgina Hayns, Jill Ahllstrand
-ANIMATION: Anthony Scott , Trey Thomas....AND MANY MORE!!!!!!!!GALLERY NUCLEUS in L.A. has a CORALINE PANEL DISCUSSION planned. And apparently the CARTOON ART MUSEUM in San Francisco is having a CORALINE EXHIBITIONshowing a lot of the art department's work along with Puppets and Sets. So that's rad. Bottom line: Coraline is an incredible achievement on so many levels. This is the kind of film most people (especially in animation) say they want to see more of (or at least work on)- A more adult, edgier, unconventional animated film. Coraline follows no convention. Henry has created a new fairy tale film language. We need films like this to succeed, because I for one want to work on more like them, and so studios like LAIKA can CONTINUE TO TAKE RISKS. So please people! GO SEE CORALINE FEBRUARY 6th !!!!!

COLORING BOOK PROJECT

I was recently invited to take part in a very cool project created by Margaret Wuller and Rachel Tiep-Daniels (Two very talented artists here at Dreamworks). It is called the Picture Book Project , a Coloring Book illustrated by professional artists to benefit orphaned children in Ghana, Africa and Tijuana, Mexico. Once published , copies of the coloring books will be given to the children , and book sale proceeds will be donated to the Corazon de Vida Foundation and save widows and Orphans Development Center. The theme was - Circus Freaks, Crazy Creatures, Imaginary lands, and monsters. We were asked to create a line version, and then a colored version of our lined version for the book as well. This is my contribution. I just did something I would want to color when I was a kid.

CORALINE

I was lucky enough to be a part of Henry Selick's next stop motion Film , CORALINE. I was a Principle Character Designer on the film along with Shannon Tindle and Dan Krall. I also did most of the animation pre-vis and design for the expressions, dialogue animation, and head replacements. Now some footage and "making of" material from the film can be seen on rottentomatoes.com. A few of the puppets were even on display at Comic-con this year which is pretty cool. Its exciting to see this stuff come to fruition. The crew on this film (Puppet builders , sculptors, story and development artists, set builders, animators , camera people etc..) is not to be believed! The best stop motion crew in history is all over this film! Ridiculous ! I could not be more proud to be part of THIS FILM.

BEN BALISTRERI puts a fire under everyones butt!

Well, Get ready to feel lazy and inadequate because BEN BALISTRERI'S SEAWEED #1 is ready to be seen , gawked at , and BOUGHT! There is absolutely nothing out there I can compare this book to other than FRANQUIN at his height, BUT EVEN THAT doesn't describe the unique storytelling , entertainment value , humor and THOUGHT put into this book. AND THE 24 PAGE SKETCHBOOK SECTION IS INSANE!!! I could not be more proud to recommend something more highly. I was lucky enough to be classmates with Ben , and are finaly working together at Dreamworks where he is tearin'it up. He is one of the greatest guys you can imagine and I think his talent speaks for it self. All I can say is , buy this now ! There is nothing more worthy of your hard earned dollar, Book wise! The bar has just been raised for self published books. Thanks Ben , Now halfway doesn't cut it any more! I'm starting over!

"INDIANA JONES and the punch in the gut"

My heart hurts. I have not posted in a while because I've been ridiculously busy. No really, REALLY!. WHAAAAA! I know, but I have been preparing for a move and everything I have been working on (including my own projects) I can not post, so I will try to squeeze in some new pieces more regularly. Now, back to crying in my pillow.

JONES!!!

Man I hope the movie does not suck! I need every piece of Indy Merchandise they throw at me. Here is an action pose I had to get out of my system along with one of my tiny gesture scribbles. I used the colors as they appear on film at the begining of Raiders, the Jacket is just darker(Same for Temple),It just feels right. You will be seeing more Indy on this blog for sure.

Brother and Sister

HAPPY NEW YEAR! This is a piece for a project I was working on early last year with Ben Balistreri and Shannon Tindle. We abandoned the project for a better Idea.

QUICK SANTA STUDY

Merry Christmas everybody! This is a very quick, unfinished study of Santa with his list bearing elf (I just thought he would have one).I also wanted to try something new with a christmas elf and make him look more mythological in contrast to a human Santa. I'm not sure what the story could be here because it was just a fast flow of consciousness piece done last night. I really love Christmas and holiday art and wanted to do something fun. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

SEARLE ASSIGNMENT

So all the development artists at Dreamworks have been teaching a character design workshop at the studio. The latest assignment we gave the class was to start designing on three films as animated features-Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian,and the Three Musketeers, and the restriction is that it all has to be done in the style of RONALD SEARLE! Whenever we give an assignment we do it as well, So here's my Conan done in mid sixties Searle style.

(And more Holiday art is on the way.)

A HARVEST MOON ON HALLOWEEN

Last night I wanted to do a little piece that felt like fall AND Halloween. So here.

FINALY A VACATION!!

For the past two weeks I have been on my first vacation in about six years. It was all sparked off in Kentucky with the wedding of my friends Shannon and Megan. It was awsome. Then since we were on that side of the country I figured we would go nerd out at Disney World- An entire city designed and aranged by many of my favorite artists- Herb Ryman , Marc Davis, Sam McKim ,Claud Coats, Rolly Crump, Mary Blair , etc... Below Are some pictures of the Contemporary Resort where we stayed for part of the trip. The amazing mosaic in the hotels' atrium was designed by Mary Blair. It is a masterwork of pattern and proportion. Mary placed one five legged goat into the mosaic because in native american culture the gods had to make at least on thing imperfect so that they would be the only ones that were truly perfect. Pretty cool.



Earlier while in Kentucky I had to stop by the Louisville Slugger Museum and factory. A)- Me in front of the biggest bat in the world. B)-The inside of the museum with me admiring a Mickey Mantle bat. C)- One of Babe Ruth's bats from his 1927 season where he hit 60 home runs! He hit 21 with this bat and placed a notch around the slugger logo for every one. D)- I got to knock the crap out of some balls using exact replicas of Babe Ruth , Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jrs' bats.

color key and screen grabs from GILROY

So here are a few more images from Project Gilroy. The school was layed out By Chris Tsirigotis and painted by RD. We have a few X-ray scenes that play a part in the story. The house and barn is a small digital color key painted by RD. Go to SHANNONTINDLE.BLOGSPOT.COM to see more!

FROM THE SET OF GILROY

ALright, Here are a couple screen grabs from GILROY, our recently completed pilot for Cartoon Network. I will be posting a couple images every week. GO TO SHANNON TINDLE'S BLOG TO SEE MORE. Thank you so much to everyone that came to our premiere screening, and thank you for the incredibly kind feed back afterwards. The crowd overflowed out into the lobby and I think it was a good sign that even those people were laughing and cheering. I want to thank some of the amazing people that helped us out on Gilroy- Chris Tsirgiotis for our beautiful layouts, R.D.for our beautiful BG paintings, Dave Lee on FX on props, Ilya and Greg our editors, Roger for our character color, Hacienda Post for our amazing sound ,and Jackie Buscarino and Shaun Hamid for keeping everything organized. And a huge thank you to my coharts in all of this -Shannon Tindle and Andy Schuhler.

GILROY

So, 3.5 years after we pitched the thing we finaly got to make it. Well half of it. The last half is full brilliant color animation (because that's all they would allow us budget wise), and the first half is a very, very fleshed out animatic. The 22 minute Pilot is a wrap for now and is screening for our peers at Cartoon Network on Friday. If you didn't know , I along with my friends Andy Schuhler and Shannon Tindle created a pilot for Cartoon network which we finally started full production on (in our spare time) in mid October 2006. Our goal was to bring some feature sensabilities to an animated tv show in story , tone , pace and visual language. Oh and to make it entertaining as hell. We just wanted to make something that we would have an absolute ball working on. Cartoon Network let us do it and people tell us we did alright. Will you ever see it? WHO KNOWS! Keep posted. So this is a poster I cranked out last night for the screening. And if you look down 6 posts ago you can see a few special poses I did for our show.

BASEBALL

I played baseball intensively from the time I was seven years old all the way through highschool. I've been getting nastalgic about it lately , so I did these pieces.

The batter above is just entering the batting circle to warm up as he gives the current batter a motivational clap. That's what My old highschool uniform looked like.

I gave this guy a 1960's Yankee uniform. Batters looked cooler without helmets. I love this moment just as the ball is leaving the pitchers hand, and even as the batter shifts his weight to antic he is still judging to see if the pitch is going to be hitable. It all happens so fast.

Jackie Robinson (above) had a great stockey build. He was springy but heavy. I always loved his 1960's Dodger uniform.

SKETCHING AT 600 MILES PER HOUR

So Ben Balistreri planned a trip to the Chino Air show last weekend and said we were going to look at cool planes and eat like kings. I brought my sketch pad and attempted to sketch planes as they were taxiing, taking off, flying , and landing. The show was awsome. At one point there were 26 World War 2 planes (Including Japanese Zeros) all in the air at the same time. It was an insane sketching challenge. I never had time to look down at my paper so these sketches are as raw as they come. Doing a blind sketch of an F18 flying bye at 600 miles per hour will loosen you up real quick!

OH MY ZOD!!!

OK, I love drawing Superman. I have ever since I could hold a pencil.I was inspired to do this piece after recently watching the Donner cut of Superman 2. Which I actually did think was stronger in a lot of ways than the original non-Donner version . Ok , except for the turning back time thing at the end damnit.The first two movies were so rad ,and Christopher Reeve is such an amazing Superman. I tottaly believed him as that character when I was a kid. I also like Alex Ross's Superman , where he looks like an older burly man. Whatever , Expect to see more Superman pieces on this blog in the near future. I'm a nerd.

CAL ARTS ASSIGNMENT

Last week me and my friend Shannon Tindle were invited to come to CAl Arts to give a lecture on development and design. We gave the kids the assignment to design Ebeneezer Scrooge , Jacob Marley , and Tiny Tim based on Dickens description of those characters from the book "A Christams Carol". To give the students some more insentive to do the assignment WE did the assignment ourselves (along with a few other profesionals-Ben Balistreri , Devin Crane , Dave Pimentel, and Aurion Redson.) It was due yesterday and the students tore it up ! Even a few alumni did the assignment and made a surprise visit. The outcome and presentaions were really inspiring. There is a cynergy and excitment at that place that is pretty incredible.Those kids are hungry and talented! So here are the Marley and Scrooge designs I did for class.

CHARACTER DESIGN INTERVIEW.

Hey everyone! Go to www.characterdesign.blogspot.com , or go to my links and click on "CHARACTER DESIGN BLOG" to check out an interview I just did for Randall Sly's character design blog . There are a bunch of pieces that you have not seen on my blog as well. This is one of the pieces on the character design blog . Its another page of warm up doodles I do before I work on the Cintiq at home.

WHY I NEVER POST

I am really ,really busy. Just after Thanksgiving I started fulltime at Dreamworks Feature Animation. Me and my friend Shannon are developing the Peabody and Sherman feature film from the ground up. Rob Minkoff (the director) brought us on to be the very first artists involved with the film. We're doing everything from character design to story. If you know anything about Peabody and Sherman you know that it is about time travel, and it has been one of my dreams to work on a time travel film. AWESOME! It's so fun.
So on top of that (in my non-existant spare time) me and my buddies have been trying to wrap up our 22 minute short for Cartoon Network. Over the past two months I have been feverishly drawing and numbering and yelling to be able to get everything shipped to the Rough Draft team to start animation. Below is a tiny, tiny sample of the HUNDREDS of special poses, charts, and expressions I have done over the past few weeks. I don't sleep any more.

Happy Holidays

Happy holidays everyone. I apologize for the lack of posts but I am doing three jobs at once right now. But one quick update on our Cartoon Network short... We just recorded all our voices... Gary Cole (the boss in Office Space) , Illeana Douglas (Good Fellas) , Tony Plana ( Ugly Betty, Three Amigos), Kevin Michael Richardson (Lilo and Stich and much more). And a crazy 8 year old named Zack. It was unbelievable working with all of these incredibly talented actors. Have a great Holiday everyone!

"Gobble , Gobble"

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!! I had to draw this last night to try and get in the holiday mood because it is 90 degrees in L.A.! What the F !

I Love fall

Hey everyone! I'll have updates on our projects as soon as I have time to breath. Have a rad Halloween everyone!

Back in LA

Hey everyone. I just moved back to LA to start production on a couple of projects that my friends and I have created. I'm finally in an office getting paid to MAKE OUR OWN STUFF!! I'll be posting more often now that I'm getting settled , and I'll give little updates on the projects as we go. ( see the GILROY post a couple weeks ago) Its good to be back.

Curious Old People

Here are a couple designs I did for the CURIOUS GEORGE movie. The old man in color was based on on an elderly Richard Harris (if he was wearing Ollie Johnstons' sweater). And the one underneath him is what would happen if Dick Van Dyke and Jerry Goldsmith had a baby.

Warm up Doodles

When I'm working on the cintiq I usually draw alot of random crap to warm up.

A hell of a first blog week

Thank you again to Amid , Ovi , Ben , and Cartoon Brew for the incredible Kick off to my premiere blog week .That was a very unexpected surprise.And thank you to anyone who gives a turd about this stuff. And stay tuned, there is MUCH more on the way. Oh, I drew this while I was watching the Twilight Zone marathon.