Sketchbook Assortment #1
December 29, 2006 - posted in sundries
The Mystery Work in Progress is still in progress and still a mystery. It’s going very slowly. I’ve been working on and off on this project, at night, in my basement, for about 2 years now, with huge breaks for other work and life-living. It’s hard to keep the momentum sometimes.
In the mean time I’ve scanned in lots of random pages from sketchbooks I can post here, just for the hell of it. Some of these are many years old, but they’re just laying around, so…
Here is Random Sketchbook Assortment #1:
Fight Club Paper Products
December 17, 2006 - posted in sundries
A couple years ago, I was at the office supply store when these Avery Matte White High Visibility Labels caught my eye:
Over at the Avery Dennison in-house design department, you can picture a pale, skinny, Edward-Norton-looking graphic designer, sitting in a cubicle under florescent lighting, hating his work and dreaming of overthrowing his boss. But instead of founding a liposuction-fueled soap company, or a quasi-terrorist underground boxing league, this little culture jammer stuck it to the man by mixing a little Mayhem into his package design assignment that the management wouldn’t likely notice right away.
Or maybe it was all a big misunderstanding… Some employee of Avery Dennison or their hired design house got bored and sent out a humorous prank memo to the other designers:
Ha, ha, ha. “Paper Street.” Everyone in the studio had a good laugh and went about their day, continuing, as they always had, to design packaging with sample labels addressed to “Jane Jones.” Everyone, that is, except that one weird guy who sits in near the door and keeps track of how many donuts you took from the break room. You know that guy? He doesn’t get jokes. He takes everything literally and follows orders without question.
So off he went, dutifully obeying the memo and updating the design he’d been working on that morning. Two months later, to his surprise, the poor bastard gets canned for having undermined Avery Dennison’s profile as a family-friendly leader in paper solutions. (By God, they would not have their sterling reputation tarnished by those awful goings-on at Tyler’s place down on Paper Street!!)
Today that poor, unsuspecting designer is bitter and unemployed, holed up in a basement somewhere, silently planning the destruction of Western Civilization. Tyler Durden, indeed.
That’s how I like to think it happened…
Now don’t you have a cartoon you’re supposed to be working on? Oh, wait.
Seriously, now. Get the hell back to work.
Ideas for Backgrounds
December 1, 2006 - posted in work in progress
I was messing with some backgrounds for the new short. Here are some beginnings of ideas.
I like the idea of sort of finding small things that resemble bigger things. Maybe it can make the environments look more like they just exist, rather than having been drawn by anyone… The pictures you get at the end of a roll of film have that weird film-end thing from light leaks. If you zoom in really close, it can look like a horizon or a sky.
Then you mess with the color and combine them with other things, like torn paper, concrete, and ink-soaked blotter paper…
…and you start to get things that look like weird landscapes. They look like maybe they were discovered, as opposed to created. I’ve got a long way to go to figure out how this all fits together, but these have potential I think:
