Monthly Archives: December 2007

General, Shanghai

Rainy Taxi Ride

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My friends gave me a Canon TX1 video camera for my birthday. So nice of them! And maybe for you… because now I can record and post videos. My hope is to capture some of what’s going on inside the studio, in Shanghai, and with my adventures around China. Here’s the first (crappy) test:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5IOqt1lkE 400 400]

Me taking a taxi ride to work this morning. Extremely interesting huh? Usually I ride my bike to work, but not on cold and rainy days. And today was especially cold! Winter has definitely come to Shanghai.

I’ll mount this thing to my bike one morning. Then you’ll have something interesting to watch!

Grimm

Dirty Baby

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Since yesterday was my birthday, I figured it would be appropriate the post a baby today.

Dirty Baby

Human characters like this baby often get re-used between episodes in Grimm. Unless the character is visually or narratively unique – like a Red Riding Hood or Cinderella – we don’t see much point in wasting effort on modeling tons of individual characters. Villager001 can stand in for “guy fishing” most of the time.

That being said, one of the great things about Grimm is how visually distinct each new episode is. For each episode our artists produce close to 70 new models – buildings, characters, plants, animals, and other miscellaneous items.

GameTap

My What a Big Mouth You Have

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When writing design scripts for Grimm episodes we’re constantly challenging ourselves to present the most interesting characters, items, and locations. It’s sometimes frustrating how many generic “castles” appear in fairy tale stories. But we’re excited when a tale offers us the chance to explore a truly unique location, as is the case with this image:

Wolf Mouth

This is the interior of the Big Bad Wolf’s mouth. We created a Grimm level inside the Wolf – using his mouth as the entrance – for the “Red Riding Hood” episode. You don’t want to know where the exit is!

General, Grimm

Sad Cat

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Concept art is awesome. Over the past few months the Spicy Horse concept artists have generated nearly a thousand unique bits of artwork to drive asset production for Grimm. As a general rule, nothing in Grimm gets built without first being represented in concept. Up until today we were unable to show much of this amazing work to the world, but now all that’s changed.

Grimm Cat


Here you see a sad cat. Like all assets in Grimm the cat has both a light and a dark version. That means that each object in our world actually has to be built twice.

I’ll try to post an image a day from now on. Enjoy!

GameTap, Grimm

Roger Jackson – The Voice of Grimm

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At the start of the Grimm project I had the idea that we’d manage to record 99% of our voice over work in-studio. Our office has a dedicated sound guy, a beautiful sound recording room, and everything else necessary for the task – except one thing: voice talent.

The team tried a few times to capture the “voice of Grimm” as well as various NPC dialogs. What came out of our efforts was random one-liners for NPCs, stuff like “Ahhhhg!”, “Noooo!” and a distinct feeling that we wouldn’t be able to do this thing on our own.

Enter Roger Jackson. You may know him as the voice of Abraham Lincoln in “Sam & Max Season One: Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die” (which, it turn out you can check out free on Gametap!), Mojo Jojo from Powerpuff Girls, or Dormouse, Jabberwock, and Cheshire Cat from “Alice”. His work is legendary and excellent.

Yesterday, we received the first batch of VO work from Roger.

Check it out here: Roger-Grimm-Jack

jack_fix

(Jack concept image from the “Jack and the Beanstalk episode of Grimm)

To say I am excited would be an understatement. What you are listening to is Roger acting the part of our main character Grimm, who is introducing the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. This is how each episode of Grimm will begin – an introduction to the light version of a fairytale. Grimm (aka Roger) presents the tale in puppet theater format, acting out all the voices in the story.

To hear Roger as Grimm doing the voices of Jack’s mom, the singing harp, the Giant, and others is pure joy. It’s great to have him on the project.

Spicy Horse

Rocking Horses

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It’s official. We love Rock Band. Despite it not being available in Shanghai, EA’s insistence on region locking their games, and other obstacles – we managed to get our hands on a setup. To say we’re happy would be an understatement. We just *really* hope the drums don’t break too fast.

Here you see (left to right) Ken, Marwin, Matt (from Vykarian), and Matt during the first Spicy Jam Session. Somehow our first band ended up being named “Wang Dong”. We don’t even know what that means.

Rocking Horses