Pirates!

It's killing me that I'm not getting my own projects done, but when the Green comes calling, like a whore, I follow. I had/have lots of older images on the website, but no explanations or captions, and in the interest of keeping new content on the blog until this bit of overworking madness finishes up, I'm going to post some older projects and talk about my involvement/and for legal reasons, my own 'interpretation of the events.'

I'll start with a little background, one day I got two scripts on my desk, one The Haunted Mansion, with Eddie Murphy already attached, and Pirates of the Caribbean, months before Johnny Depp was announced as the lead. We were told that Mansion was the big play, and the Company wasn't really going to support Pirates. The Mansion script sucked ass, as anyone who saw the movie already knows, and it was pretty much shot with this script. Pirates was a fantastic read, and remember, this is before any of the craziness Depp brought to the role, so when we had our weekly meeting I begged to be the artist on the pitch for the video game. So I got it, and then a few weeks later I was told there wasn't going to be a game, no support from the Company.

So fast forward a bit, and the Mansion movie comes out, a game is released to go with, and it has nothing to do with the movie because during the course of production, the heads realized THERE WAS NO GAME in that script, so the Mansion team did the best they could. And that movie/game is forgotten to the history if the world. By then Pirates is in post production, and the buzz on the Lot was insane, this movie was going to be big. Anybody with half a brain, who had read the scripts side by side, could have predicted this, (and I can be fairly safe in saying the entire group I worked with saw this coming, but this is the END DAYS of the Eisner Era) and would have had a game ready. So panic ensues, and the heads make the most moronic decision to sign over rights to commandeer a pirate game about to be released and barely re-skin it to justfy a PotC title on the box.

Fast forward again, and it's time to talk sequels, and no, we won't make the same mistake again. I get the assignment, and work with probably my most favorite working partner I had at Diz, a producer named...(since I don't want to name him without him knowing about it, we'll call him Karzappy, he'll know who he is)...Karzappy, so we sit down to brainstorm ideas.

And so begins the art; we had books of Pirate legends, so we started with a Hippogriff, based on the pics in the book, there was a horse and a lion shown, both front halves normal, but with sea serpent tails. So I picked the lion, and since we needed to address the first movie, we started to fill in events, and this is how Jack's boat started to sink, after a battle with some Sea Lions in the game. Also, we needed a game hub, so we came up with the wrecked ships rigged together, with an old hermit who gives advice to Jack. If you've seen the third movie...interesting. I doubt that any of this art really made it outside the walls of our offices, especially to the production, I think it's more a case of great minds think alike.

So this is the beginning of Pirates Week, or two, and I'll be adding more art and insight to this doomed pitch every day, until I'm out.