Brawl Magnet comes to life.

Finally- after many many months....er, years....in the planning, Brawl Magnet is coming to life and uttering his first words! I'm having a blast with this character!

The magic of LIGHT!

It always amazes me how good lighting can transform a set from something good to something amazing. I was happy to have the Robot Chicken/Moral Orel DP Jeff Gardner in to help me with lighting this week. JeffyG had some really cool ideas and the end product looks amazing! Thanks Jeffy!

I also want to thank Celeste Leipham, one of our Assistant Animators on Robot Chicken, for generously giving her time this week to break down the dialog tracks for this scene. I've got a nice tidy stack of exposure sheets all ready to go!

Here's Jeffy shedding some light on the Brawl Magnet stand-in puppet (The real puppet is still in progress):

Help when I need it most.

I've been a couple of days behind schedule on the set I'm building. There are so many steps to the paint work and I am just one lone artist! Who can I call on for help! My wife Cindy came to my rescue this weekend, using her great color sense and skill with a brush to take the lead on aging the set. All the grease and grime really made the set come together! I feel so lucky to have such a cool girl to help me.

Check back soon- the set will be getting the magic glow of incandescent lighting tomorrow!

Here's Cindy adding some grime to a few of the set pieces:



And here I am doing the same:

Another set going up!

Wow- long run without any new SuperBattle news...but I'm still going!

It is now the break between Robot Chicken and Moral Orel, and Shadow Machine Films has been kind enough to let me use the studio for my film for the next few weeks. I have been busily working away on a new set, and this time I was lucky to get some help from master model maker Logan Payne Logan helped me for a full week, focusing primarily on creating a stasis pod for the new set. Logan hand carved the shapes for the pod out of sculpting foam and then created a vacuform "buck" to pull four identical pieces from. It is amazing work- Thank you Logan for your time and talent! And also thank you to Shadow Machine Films for opening their doors to the animators personal projects during the hiatus!

Here are some pictures of Logan working on the pod: