THE PIRATES WHO DON'T DO ANYTHING- Character designs, pt.2

This is the second post about the new Veggietales "Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" movie that just opened this weekend. As I mentioned in the last post, Funnypages Productions played a key role in the development of the film. This post is about some of the characters we designed. There were many new characters in this film (beyond the existing ones already in the
Veggie Universe) and we were called in to work with the talented art director at Big Idea, Chuck Vollmer, to help create them. We just realized we don't have scans of most all of that work (they were very protective of the work "getting out there" and it was a quick schedule) so this post has stills from the film to show off the designs. At least until we can get some sketches up. We created the designs for main characters like the evil Pirate Robert (with the mechanical arms and legs), Elloise and Alexander (the two children of the king that are in peril), the good King, the Cheese Curl creatures (who still remind me of Rob, who designed them), many, many pirates on the ship and in the "bar" scene (their drinking root beer), as well as the scene stealing Rock Monster family. The latter, I have to say, are the ones I am personally most proud of. The animation studio that Big Idea hired to create the modeling (which is all really strong) and the animation (equally strong, though a bit over animated here and there) really pulled the rock monsters off well! I'd say all the characters only improved on down the production pipeline with Chuck V. along with Director Mike N (I'll spell it wrong, you know who I mean) leading it all. When you look at the film, knowing it had a budget (probably) under 10 mill and the visual development was all created in about a 6 week period, it's truly amazing it looks so strong and cohesive! Everyone really put forth their experience and effort on this one. As artists it's not always easy to look back and say this, but this time: we are proud of the result.