Finally Xilva!

Several years back when Andy wrote the first few scripts for Midieville they looked much different than anything we have on the website.  The stories were meant to be full 10-20 minute animated adventures following a trio of creatures sent on quests by the king.  Those three adventurers were: Marvin the blue wizard, Gidju the dragon and Xilva the elf.  Though when we started making the Midieville shorts they were mostly just a way for us to cut our teeth in animation and served as tests for things we wanted to try out.  For logistical reasons, the lovely Xilva was cut from those and we just never found a good story point to add her into the fray... until now.

Now that we're taking the world of Midieville and putting it in our upcoming Nintendo Wii U game, Of Mages & Pages, Xilva has a place in the land of Midieville once more.  So, I present to you a peek at one of the oldest and most neglected characters from the 3twins wheelhouse, Xilva the elf.  This concept drawing comes from S. LaDon Ware.  Xilva will be joining our heroes at some point in the game and finally take her place next to Marvin and Gidju!

~Jason

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

Voice Actor Profile: Steve Surine

Today, I'm taking a look at Steve Surine, affectionately refereed to sometimes as "The Third Twin".

Steve, like myself, began doing voices as a young child, with his adorable impressions of Gizmo, talking in silly voices, or doing various accents, mainly because his family thought it was hilarious. This naturally lead him to be involved in children s musicals at church, but due to his shyness, he was rarely given a speaking part.

But those musicals did help him break out of his "shyness shell" a bit and in High School he took a Drama Class, which helped to bust it fully.

Around the same time Steve started doing bigger parts in small drama's for the church youth group and he and I began writing a few plays together for our Creative Writing class.

Then after High School Steve, Andy and I did a few home videos where we basically just goofed off (you can see the fruits of those efforts in "Ode To Mother's Day" and the "Indiana Foster Trilogy"). Steve also had a few more prominant roles in adult Church Musicals while in college.

On 3twins.net, Steve voices: Glomo, Zapman, Regular Man, Gidju, and Bob Palindrome, just to name a few. One of my favorites to look out for in the coming months is the voice he does for a Japanese beetle named, Bishamon which will debut in Ion Bunny 5 early next year.

Well, that's all for now,
Remember to join me next time when I mirror my previous post, somewhat, with the voice actor profile of my twin, Andy.

Until then,
I'm Jason Kuder and you're reading my words!