Gil the Honda Crab and some of his pals

This is a campaign I worked on for about three years for the Honda Element.We tested for this job early on , in fact it came in as a bid for a local commercial ,went away for a year and then miraculously came back as a series of national spots.The agency came to us with a couple of pieces of art and some scripts.At first the scripts seemed pretty minimal ,too dry even, but then we realized it was about timing and in particular, awkward pauses .So we wracked our brains for a film or TV show that would have an appropriate dialog style for a scratch track .It was my pal Nathan that came up with "Chuck and Buck",a film with truly squirm-worthy dialog and timing.That scratch track along with an appropriatly quirky bit of after -fx puppetry of a donkey and an element ,by my pal Erica,landed us the campaign.
Believe it or not each of these spots was boarded and timed out first .They might appear to be radio plays with cut out photos but we actually did work hard to push the timing to support the very well written scripts.

This was from their "urban" campaign , there was some nervousness about the sneakers on the
wire and gang implications.

color rip offs

This is a favorite rejected character that I designed for a commercial this year that was supposed to be modern but feel a bit Hanna Barbera or School House Rock.In other words they were to look like low budget Saturday morning designs from the 1960's to the 1980's but not retro.I started obsessing on the color styling and, not wanting to fall into my old color habits I decided to "borrow" from an array of some of my favorite designer's color pallettes from different eras and see if I could tell what era they were from just by the combination of colors.


1960's Sci Fi Book Cover Designer
Modern Comic Book Character Designer
1960's Poster Designer
Modern Illustrator

Happy Halloween

Animax ID's

From deep in the vault...

yet another American client who wanted a Japanese look for Japanese clients but only wanted to work with an American production company .This time the client was Animax , a Japanese animation channel that needed I.D.'s .
The theme for this one was" pre-school/ romance".

This is one of my rejected girl designs, the flawless Osamu Tsuruyama ,our authentic Japanese "ringer ",ended up designing all the humans ,doing most of the layouts and animating a large portion of these ID's.

My attempt at a Miyazki inspired creature design .

The theme of this one was "pre- school /action".

This rotating spaceship was hand animated by none other than that Smokin' genius ... J.Garrett Sheldrew .

The theme for this one was "grade-school /action"

My robot monster.

....and "grade-school/ romance" .

microsoft for the web

This is a cut-down of some spots I directed for Microsoft Vista for the web .It was fun working on something that was supposed to look "Ye Olde ".The animation was done with puppeting through After Effects .

This is the character design style I was initially pushing for .

These are the round of roughs that proved to be the actual design direction.

SuperNike ,Friendship

Here is one of three Nike spots for Japan I directed, where the animated characters were supposed to look "manga" style not anime , hence the comic book speed lines and sound fx bubbles .The final character designs were by an authentic Japanese comic artist and the animation was done in Vancouver by Natterjack .For the live action portions I got a chance to direct some major leaguers , Ken Griffey Jr. and a couple of Japanese players .