Extreme Ghostbusters design works
The first hunk rounds up all the visual notes I came up with while studying my first script, Killjoys (the evil clown episode). These days, the fancypants word for this kind of work is “previz.” I don’t usually take it to this level now, it all depends on the complexity of the script. On Avengers Assemble I did it a LOT.
Moody “noir” angles for alleyway scenes
Sometimes I designed key props when I had a very clear idea in my head. It didn’t seem worth bothering the design department if I already knew what I was after. And they appreciated me lightening their load.
The second hunk is from The Unseen…
This is the storyboard paper we used, which was kind of insane. It takes some explaining…
Traditionally, you’d have 3 panels to a page on legal-size paper. But this was the beginning of the digital era, in which art would be scanned and loaded into Adobe Premiere to make animatics (a slideshow with sound). The workload for this was enormous, and the head of that department wanted to automate as much as possible in the scanning process. His solution was this single-panel page. I guess it was easier to extract a single picture than three.
Anyway, this meant that we went through THOUSANDS of these pages on every episode (rather than hundreds). I can’t imagine how much storage space they’re now taking up somewhere. After an animatic was finished and locked, all the art was output on three-panel paper. That’s what you see in the XGB storyboards I’ve posted.
The next hunk is from The Jersey Devil…
I took on the first round of creature design. It was meant to be a large dragon-like creature made of metal with a chunk missing. If it managed to find and re-absorb that chunk, it would become unstoppable.
Fil Barlow, the lead character designer for the series, finalized this version and I did a sketchover to add texture.
“Ben” was the character voiced by Eddy Albert. His son supplied the sherrif’s voice.
Egon’s cell phone was based on the one I bought when I started working at Sony Animation Studio. It was many times larger than a smart phone and the battery was always dead when I needed it the most. I eventually broke it in half and dumped it in a trash can.
Generic cityscape for the opening of another episode. I’ve done SO many cartoons set in New York City, it’s like I lived there.
This last hunk is from part 1 of Back in the Saddle, for which I had the honor of redesigning the original “Real Ghostbusters” and making them several years older.
