9.10.2009

maximum armature design



today i noticed a handful news and blog posts referencing the imminent premier of the upcoming [adult swim] series "titan maximum". this new stop motion animated series was produced by shadow machine, who are the people who are responsible for bringing you shows like "robot chicken" and "morel orel". when i was down in LA earlier this year i took a short break from working on the TOP SECRET stuff at buddy system and built a nice ball and socket armature for the mega-mecha-robot character that the show as named after. (think voltron.) it was not really possible for me to work alongside the crew at shadow machine, but i did visit them a couple of times and i have to say that i was very impressed with the work they were doing. if you are expecting another show with a similar visual aesthetic to robot chicken, i think you will be surprised by the quality of the puppets on this show. in order to make sure the armature would be capable of performing all of its necessary duties once it was out of my hands, i worked closely with animation director ethan marak, and rob ronning and dan field in the puppet department. i give those guys full credit for doing all of the heavy lifting with the puppet design way before i got involved with anything. i just basically just executed a pretty well thought out plan. those guys are sharp, and it was a pleasure to work with them.
i never had a chance to see any footage from the show, so i'll be looking forward to the the series premier on september 27th, just like the rest of you.

here are a couple of those links i was talking about at the top.

p.s. the puppets in the picture above look really nice, but unfortunately i can't take credit for any part of their fabrication. to my knowledge, no pics of the titan puppet have been released as of this posting.

UPDATE: new adultswim titan maximum site with sneak peak trailer thing here.