#6ph

It's over 90 degrees here in Southern California this weekend, the perfect moment to post some refreshing beach scenes from a few of the promotional 2D shorts I directed for Minions: The Rise of Gru, out July 1!

I got to do a range of really cool projects at Illumination, between co-directing a theme park ride (something I'd never imagined), directing international commercials and doing a ton of these 2D Minions shorts, where you're executing one central gag, a 'classic' format I love. I think we made close to 25 of these--I lost count!

The shorts that were released here in the US didn't include the title cards, so I wanted to share of few of them here. For many of these, I drew the layout with Tidawan and Sophie Crowley, both hugely talented, doing the final color.

Most of them were made back in 2018 in preparation for the Minions: the Rise of Gru release, originally slated for...2020. They were mostly for the Chinese territories, specifically their Migu Internet Cafes, but were later repurposed for the Illumination YouTube channel, where you can watch almost all of the shorts. Some are still to be released.

And because many of the shorts don't have credits, I want to list them here.

BEACH BALL, Written and storyboarded by Tom King. Backgrounds by Sophie Crowley and me. Title-card by Sophie Crowley and me

CASTAWAY 1, Written by Derek Drymon and me. Storyboard by Jay Lender and me. Backgrounds by Tidawan T. Title-card by Tidawan T and me.

July is right around the corner, which means we're starting to see the second phase of marketing for the premiere of Minions: The Rise of Gru. So I thought I'd post a short commercial I did in 2017 for the Despicable Me 3 marketing campaign. This one is for the OFO public bikes that used to be in several major cities. This commercial was for a campaign in China; you can see the Beijing skyline in the background.

It was important to the client that we see the skyline, but we didn't have time to generate Beijing CG environments. Instead, I combined stylized 2D environments with the CG character animation, and I think it came out pretty well. Six Point Harness (6PH) did all the 2D and final comp while MacGuff in Paris did all the CG.

As part of this marketing campaign, thousands of Minions bikes were made and distributed all over China.

Ofo has since gone out of business.