As I mentioned earlier I’m going away mid May to Asia for a 5/6 month holiday and have finally confirmed all my dates!

I’d love to meet up with some people along the way, eat some meals, play some basketball or just scribble over a coffee! So, if your in any of these places or simply just know of any cool things, places, hotels, eats and so on to do in these places please let me know.

• Singapore, 26 - 30 May
• Bali, 30 May - 9 June
• Kuala Lumpur, 11 - 15 June
• Penang, 16 - 19 June
• Bangkok, 20 - 23 June / 16 - 26 August
• Vientiane, 25 - 30 June
• Luang Prabang, 1 - 5 July
• Hanoi, 6 - 13 July
• Hue/Hoi An, 14 - 20 July
• Nha Trang, 20 - 23 July
• HCMC, 24 - 28 July
• Phnom Penh, 28 July - 5 August
• Siem Reap, 6 - 10 August
• Battambang, 11 - 15 August
• Taipei, 27 August - 2 September
• Kaohsiung, 3 - 6 September
• Shanghai, 8 - 12 September
• Beijing, 13 - 19 September
• Xian, 23 - 27 September
• Seoul, 1 - 4 + 8 - 12 October
• Busan, 5 - 8 October
• Tokyo, 12 - 17 + 24 - 28 October
• Osaka/Kyoto, 18 - 24 October

I’d love to make some new friends along the way! Feel free to email me or reply/answer below.

I actually completed this work in November 09 and I normally blog when I’m archiving my work but I never got around to archiving this due to it being such a daunting task with over 150 versions. Its a tough one to cover from start to finish but I’ve picked out some wip files from the start, midway and the finish.

I was asked by Oktobor to work with them to develop a city and set of characters for Twisties/Saatchi Malaysia. The initial brief was roughly story boarded out as separate scenes and had to be further developed into a city along with creating and developing characters to be within this city.

I’ve thrown up the final characters and city (below) first before I run through the development of them. (click to see the high res version - 1mb) And here’s the link to the final TVC on oktobor’s site.



Gary Sullivan (the director) and I sat down and worked through the scenes one by one and I got this initial rough down. This rough was a starting point for the characters and scenes within the city itself. (click to enlarge)



With this rough we had worked out what we wanted the characters to roughly look like and what musical instruments and sounds they were making. The characters main changes from here were the proportions, originally we approached it with a cartoon feel then after agency revisions made the proportions more accurate. Most of the other ideas from this original rough made it to the final ad or late revisions rounds.

The city was perhaps the most important part. Gary and I both agreed it needed to be an actual functional city with a lively and fun feel to it. Above is an early rough of a city layout we looked into which we both felt was missing something.

We actually sat down and went around google earth looking at various city layouts for inspiration and found Vancouver and San Fransisco to be somewhat near to what we wanted to achieve.

We knew we wanted a nice center piece for the city and a bridge seemed the best option. From this we then split up the city into a few areas - A downtown area which lead into a waterfront viaduct area to one side and residential properties/agriculture/airport to the other. The other side of the bridge was the ‘in-progress’ part of the city with upcoming buildings, the docking ports, highways and road out of the city into the forest. A well thought out highway and road system brought it all together nicely!

Here’s an animated gif with a few versions while I was developing it: (click here to open - 1.6mb)

As you can see I really just kept adding to it and ended up with all sorts of cool music related buildings and more. The guys building the city in CG also added even more cool buildings they made up as they went also.

I also did some matte painting and little additions for the CG, heres a few random gig posters and garage item graphics I quickly made up.

With a total of 37 character revision versions and over 60 revisions on the city, it was an epic and awesome job to work on.

And of corse the awesomely talented peeps who worked on it with me:

Agency: Saatchi and Saatchi Malaysia, Production: Oktobor, Director: Gary Sullivan, Artists: Craig Speakman, Gary Sullivan, Geoff Kirk-Smith, Patrick Blades, Craig Baxter.

I previously create three illustrations for Ticklers new campaign and have recently completed a fourth to add to the collection.

Marrow (click to enlarge):

Art director: Lizz Moss