All during the time that everyone else in our family is doing every other thing, Sam is just quietly working, working, working to make it possible. He works all the time. [Though not on Sundays! He is…religious…about taking Sundays off of regular work (ha ha) and I love him for that. Also for usually cooking Sunday dinner.]
But other than that! So much work. Class prep, teaching, department meetings, "citizenship" (BYU's word for all the random extra stuff you have to do), committees, and constant freelance work on top of it. I'm grateful that he can work and has enough work to support us, of course! But I'm even more grateful that he is willing to do all those things, and do them so well!
Sometimes the freelance work he does is repetitive (cards for trading games😵). Sometimes it's interesting (book covers, game trailers, ads). And sometimes it's actually something lots people get to see, like for the Mario movie. A few years ago he did a ton of concept art for another movie. He did SO MUCH art for it—just pages and pages of folders and folders on his computer. A staggering amount of art, really. And of course with movies, you never even know if they'll actually be made. He is always working at the very beginning of the process doing concepts. Sometimes they scrap the characters he was working on. Sometimes they scrap the whole movie. But this movie finally came out, and it is actually pretty cute, AND so many of his characters and designs actually got used! We were all so happy to see them, after seeing them on his computer and iPad for so many months while he was working on them.
This is the movie. It was called "Pookoo" when he was working on it but now is called "Swapped." It was the #1 movie on Netflix for a while!
He didn't know if he would be in the credits (sometimes artists aren't, if it's not in their contract) but he was!
He did a million designs, most of which I don't even have pictures of, but these are a couple of the cutest ones. The little baby pookoos (?), based on baby bunnies, of course!
These little pinecone hedgehog guys were super cute too (especially the babies).
To me it seemed like a cool movie to do concept art for because the whole aesthetic was so original. All the animals are designed like plants. I love the aspen-tree deer at the top of this post so much! I have never seen any other animals like them! There were fish that looked like lily pads, and snails that closed and opened like flowers, and birds that seemed to be made of leaves, and a bunch of interesting things like that. Somehow they made them all just look cool and not strange. And then even all the tiny details—their life cycles, how they move, the little backpack the guy carries, the way the light comes through the skin of the fish, the insides of their mouths when they yawn or speak—all those things have to be thought about and drawn and iterated on. It is an amazing amount of work, and I'm happy Sam got to see it go toward a finished product he liked!
And, while I'm at it, here is some other tangible artwork Sam did recently. These were advertising posters for an ice cream shop in Vienna, Austria. Their ice cream looks amazing. (I told him to tell the company he had to go there and try the ice cream in order to do the work, but he wouldn't.) It was nice of the ad agency he worked with to send him photos of some of the posters up all around Vienna! Fun to see! This was a cool job because it wasn't like he was one of a huge team. It was all just him!
And that's all I have. Good job, Sam!
No comments