The Purple Wizard

A while back I showed one of the more important secondary characters in our game, Leon the green wizard.  Today I am showing a concept drawing of one of the other wizards from the wizard council.  There are 12 in total.  The image accompanying this post shows Jeff the purple wizard.  As you can see, Jeff is a unicorn.  This concept drawing also shows a more detailed version of what his staff will look like.

Each of the 12 wizards in our upcoming Nintendo Wii U game: Of Mages & Pages are a different type of magical creature and most of them will only be seen briefly, but we are working out the designs for each of them.  Again, this is just concept art, Jeff's final design will likely change a bit, but I wanted to share another little tidbit from the game since I haven't in a while.

~Jason

Sketching A Script To Life!

Everything starts with an idea and that idea is brought to life by an artist. Like any idea in the world of media and entertainment you must first understand the story and it's characters, then you go straight to sketching. This requires hours of sketching and refinement until the artist captures the heart of the story. The next step is carefully inking (marker) all the sketches into a final image, then i scan it onto the computer and bring it to life with color.

There was a time before Disney went CG, they were known for their reliance on traditional artists, storyboards, and sketches. Have no fear, artists are still needed to sketch out a visual depiction, whether it be for animation, movies, or a video game. Even in the world of Disney and CG, sketching remains the quickest and most valued shorthand used to bring any idea to life.

~Michael

NEW CHARACTERS: The Golden Knight

Our Nintendo Wii U game, Of Mages & Pages will feature some new characters.  I'd like to do a short series introducing each of them briefly.  The first new character is The Golden Knight.  This addition to the team is narcissism personified.  The Golden Knight sees himself as the bravest, second most important person in all the Land of Midieville; second only to the good King Mathos.

What does he look like?  Well, he's a knight and his armor is gold.  That's all you need to know for now.

I'll be back in a week or so to tease another interesting tidbit of the game.

-Jason

As an added bonus, here are some old concept drawings of what the Black Knight's helmet might have looked like (art by Steve Surine).

Early Marvin and Gidju Animatic!

I was recently looking at some of our archives and I stumbled upon a very early animatic featuring Marvin and Gidju in their concept stages! These were very early concept drawings where Marvin was thin and tall and Gidju was fat.

As many of you may know, I am not an artist, I am a writer. However, I do play around with artistic tools from time to time to help get my ideas in some crude tangible form. I created the Gidju concept through a compilation of several found clipart images. Gidju's head was modified from a hippo clipart, his body a dinosaur clipart, and the wings were from a dragon clipart. If you compare these designs to our final designs you can see how things evolved, but a lot of elements from the concepts are still present.. I think the current designs (drawn by Steve Surine) have a lot more character though.

You might notice that even though this animatic has no audio, it follows the script of the very first Midieville Teaser with Marvin making himself disappear and then reappear. Interestingly, the other background images are very similar to the final backdrop for Marvin's hut in the woods.

That's all for now,
Jason