Sunday, January 13, 2008

Surf's Up - SURFBOARDS Part 2

My friend Simon Rodgers (Sim-R) already warned me to post something or else... So here's my second installment on the Surfboard design for Surf's Up which by the way is nominated for Oscar Awards in two weeks for best animated film together with Ratatouille and Persepolis. Again, this is a surfing movie and it's a privilege to be the one to design the surfboards for the entire film.


Tank's approved surfboard above came a long way. Looking at these designs below, using his tatoo patterns and very fancy colored boards were tried. But the simpler "Jaws" motif was decided to be the best route to go.




The Japanese surfer's board was a hoot. I started with the obvious - Japanese WW2 patterns. I thought I hit the homerun till our senior 3d visdev modeler, Takao, said this could be very offensive to our Japanese friends. So I went for the high tech penguin version of a surf board which the directors liked. The characters painted on the board (which ended up on the big screen) means "Hannah Rules" - Hannah is my oldest daughter.






We have an Australian dude named Rory which the board design was based from aboriginal tribal patterns on boomerangs.




Last one on the list was the Brazilian surfer whose board has a shark bite. I love how it ended up on he big screen when art director Ron Lukas added loose shark teeth still embedded on the board.