Arenanet Internship 2013 Entry

The year came around again and the Arenanet internship 'contest' started up again. I picked a different monster this time... and man I had a lot of fun. While sculpting and enjoying yourself is a learning experience in itself... I feel like I learn a lot more when more than my own goals are in mind- matching to an existing concept that isn't my own just carries a lot of weight and a different sort of attention to detail- I felt the same way when working at Fisher-Price and matching to products.

Anyway, here's this year's entry! No matter what happens... it's much better than last years- I'm happy to have learned so much.

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S. Korea and Battle Arena!

Long time no see!

I finished my gig at Fisher Price in January... and decided to take a sort of working sabbatical! I'm now teaching English in South Korea and loving it! I'm having a great time with a temporary job change, and teaching full time rather than part time- an experience I had every summer at OSU-ACCAD for several years has been quite the experience. I'm going on six months into my excursion to the East now, and who knows what the future still has in store for me! I rather enjoy it here and I'd like to stick around...

Unfortunately I do not have a scanner, but once I find access, I hope to post some sketches from my travels in these last 6 months... including jumping around different regions of Korea, I also have been to Taipei, Kyoto, and Tokyo!

Anyway, back to business... One of the super secret projects I worked on at Fisher-Price has been released to the public! Now I can show my work on... Imaginext Battle Arena! It was a super fast project... but I have to say my favorite I worked on at Fisher-Price! I did a lot of concept work on it... modeled the set (though I can't take all the credit...I had to switch to animating before I was completely finished!), modeled some weapons, did some 2D and 3D animation on it as well! WHEW that went fast. Here's some examples of the concepts.

 

These concepts are for a short teaser trailer made by the Viz Lab for the new Imaginext playset- Battle Arena! Imagining the playset and figures in more... theatrical and dramatic circumstances was a lot of fun! Here's a link to the actual product: http://www.target.com/p/fisher-price-imaginext-battle-arena/-/A-14050572

 Some weapon designs. This was before the character figures were finalized, so we had no idea what the weapons were supposed to look like. Roman's weapons stayed they same but our viking character's hammer was replaced with something a little closer to product and these were discarded. Still got to model it though!

 Earrrrrrly concept for Axemin the viking!

And an earlier one for Roman- he didn't change a whole lot...

 Closer to the final concepts of Axemin and Roman.

I think we had only about a month on this project... it was an incredibly short time but our small team made so much content in that span...

I also made the images for the intro banners, and the flashback sequences- drawn, animated and composited. Here's a few favorite images.

I had to draw these before the product was finalized- I had to go back and forth to double check costume colors and the like! Many of them changed a lot... 

Aaaand here's the final!