My History with Shadow Puppets Part 6

In July 2004, I had a meeting with Anissa Dorsey, director of development at Cartoon Network. Anissa expressed her enthusiasm for my work and asked me if I'd be interested in doing shorts for CN. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I came up with a concept for a series: Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppet Show!


I proceeded to do a visual package demonstrating my concepts and pitched the project to Cartoon Network, as well as Disney and Nickelodeon. Cartoon Network and Disney both passed, but Nickelodeon liked the idea. After a few back and forth discussions, Nickelodeon decided to give me a budget to produce 10 short interstitials (the short pieces that go between the shows and the commercials) based on the idea.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets aired on Nickelodeon on Halloween 2005. You can view all the interstitials here, and read a production diary of the project here.

Bellingham Comicon

I will be a guest at the Bellingham Comicon this coming Saturday, October 24th.

A few days ago, I was asked to submit some artwork to publicize the event. To my surprise and delight, a still of our upcoming videogame was used as the cover of Take Five, the entertainment section of Bellingham's prime newspaper, The Bellingham Herald.


If you live in the Pacific Northwest, come on by. I'll be there with books, comics, prints, etc, and will be on hand to answer all the questions you might have about ITSP. Hope to see you there!

My History with Shadow Puppets Part 5

In 1993, when I did effects animation on Demolition Man (Check this clip to see some of the animation I did with John Van Vliet and James Mansfield), I had to ink all my drawings with black pens so that high contrast elements for the optical printer could be created. I thought the drawings all filled in with black ink looked really cool!

Once in a while, I return to that technique, and start filling in my effects concepts with black ink so I can get a stark silhouette of the design. Here are samples from The Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones which I did while I was the leading FX designer at Warner Brothers Feature Animation.

My History with Shadow Puppets Part 4

At the beginning of 2000, after completing the effects work on "The Iron Giant", I joined the visual devellopment team on the movie, "Osmosis Jones" for which I designed and supervised the special effects.

One of my early assignment was to create a series of teaser posters for the movie.

For this, I decided to work in a shadow puppet and high contrast silhouette style.

Unfortunately all my posters were rejected in favor of a more cartoony approach. You can click here for a larger view.

Joe Answers some Questions @ Joystiq.com

Click here to read.