After a few months of an industry-wide shutdown due to the pandemic, Hollywood came roaring back to life, and Legacy Effects brought me on board to help design on Paramount Plus’ new series: Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Starting in mid 2020, I spent the better part of a year designing characters for this series. I’m happy to finally be able to share some of the work I did on season one.
Tales From the Loop Designs
I had the immense privilege and tall order to do justice to the incredible work of Simon Stalenhaag in the Amazon series, Tales From the Loop. I worked with Legacy Effects to help design the Jakob robot, George Willard’s mech arm, the Vagabond droid, and a few others.
For the Jakob robot, I used Simon’s painting of a scrappy little robot for reference. I only had the back view to work with, so I did a series of designs that tried to uncover what this character’s “face” and front side looked like. He needed to be curious, shy, and non-threatening, so I studied other robots that Simon painted and came up a number of characters.
Here’s a collection of designs I did during the exploration of these beautiful, and sometimes heart wrenching stories.
Here are some stills from the series:
Marvel’s Runaways Old Lace Raptor
Last year, I had the great privilege to work on the Marvel series, Runaways. Legacy Effects was tasked out to build the raptor, Old Lace, so they contacted me to help out on the design and sculpt of the creature. The Marvel team came up with a great 2D design, so I digitally sculpted the dino, and created 3D renderings for the production team to visualize Old Lace in 3D space.
Legacy Effects took my 3D sculpt and had it milled out of foam. They then built a full scale raptor puppet that you see in the show.
It was a blast to work with the same crew that created the animatronic dinos for the original Jurassic Park films.
Here are the designs:
Check out some clips of Old Lace in show:
Alien Concepts
USA Colony Series RAP design
A while back I had the chance to help design the “RAPs” or “Hosts” from the USA tv series, Colony. I was never clued into what these things are, so I cranked out some various designs; some were more organic, some more “space suit” based. This design resonated with the production team, and they went for it. I was surprised how quickly the design process went, and before I know it, Legacy Effects was requesting the 3D files for print.
Here’s the final design:
The show is pretty cool. Check it out HERE!