Boy, those viruses, huh? They’re everywhere, trying to wreck our lives. Luckily Sophos is there to scan and sweep them away. From our computers, at least.
Creepy virus stalking the digital shadows
This was a fun, quick job that needed a very specific tone in order to convey the sense of dystopian angst- the directors sent references that were very film noir, very old school sci-fi, and it was pretty inspiring. What resulted was I think a very effective hybrid of modern tech and monolithic awe.
This was also a great fit for a new set of brushes I’d developed recently, it’s a more square and hard-edged feel, as opposed to my more fantastic and cozy style. It fit really well and made things a little easier on my execution. This was a 3-day job. Take a look!
What are we looking at? We zoom in from overhead and find ourselves in a massive stark technological landscape. Things are orderly and calm- until a creepy little bug/virus finds a weak spot and weasels in. He quickly grows and seeks to evade the AI sensors, but is soon detected. The AI deploys countermeasures to destroy the virus. But immediately, from the dead husk of the virus, a new bug evolves and emerges, rapidly multiplying even faster than before. A new swarm of bugs converges on the AI and the battle is joined in an explosive burst of light… the eternal struggle between good and evil continues.
I had a lot of fun with this. Thanks for checking it out! -Max
It’s been nearly two years since I’ve updated this blog, and it’s been a hell of a ride; and continues to be so, as there’s currently the COVID-19 pandemic getting some serious traction in LA (and thus the entertainment industry), forcing some major (hopefully temporary) shifts in what constitutes business as usual for myself and others.
But it’s not like I’m unaccustomed to adapting to adversity. Sometimes shit happens and you have to go with a different strategy. That’s survival. This post is about how my career and life were nearly derailed by a worst-case absolute nightmare scenario, and will delve deep into my personal life.
Shortly after my last post in June 2018, my daughter, Kiki, who was just 14 months old at the time, was diagnosed with Stage 4 High-Risk Neuroblastoma (Nb). This is a rare-upon-rare cancer, and there’s only 700 cases of Nb in the US every year. The Stage 4 designation is a 50/50 prognosis, which is very grim, and came as an absolute shock to be revealed by ultrasound in our seemingly perfectly healthy daughter.
Shortly after diagnosis
Neuroblastoma is a cancer of immature nerve cells. It’s almost exclusively pediatric and originates on the adrenal glands in most cases. It’s also one of the most aggressive cancers out there, and combating it requires equally aggressive countermeasures: an 18-month continuous gauntlet of chemo (6 cycles), surgery, two (2) stem-cell transplants with high-dose chemo, 18 rounds of radiation, and 6 months of immunotherapy. Obviously, my heart, my mind, my soul sank after hearing everything my precious baby would have to be put through in order to try and save her.
After essentially signing my daughter’s life away on countless medical releases and watching her become a human pincushion, something happened that I couldn’t have anticipated. All my mental constructs of what was right and wrong, what mattered and what didn’t, and my personal sense of self were destroyed. No pride, no walls, no ego anymore. I was defeated. And it was liberating. With nothing left of myself to hold onto, or defend, I became inexplicably empowered, to do anything and everything necessary to save my family. Success or failure, no one who knew my situation could judge me, turn a deaf ear, tell me no, or limit my resolve, including myself. As my wife focused on our daughter, I made sure I was focused on my wife, and then by extension, I reached out to literally everyone I knew, and asked them to help support ME, and to further spread the word if possible. Thus we swiftly had a giant pyramid of support rallied to our cause, with work colleagues, friends of friends, extended family at the bottom, and close friends in the middle, immediate family near the top, and my daughter at the pinnacle.
I had to make some big career moves. I needed all the help I could get. I incorporated, which meant opening up my work and personal finances to professional CPAs, something I’d been anxious about for a while. I joined the union, so I’m now a card-carrying member of the Art Directors Guild Local 800, something I’d never thought I’d bother with, but now I can work on union projects and access those benefits, most crucially the healthcare. There was no guarantee for my wife to continue with her work’s health benefits, so I had to make sure I could cover us, should the worst happen. It was all so daunting, and mind you, while I’m literally running around LA going to jobs, working my ass off, wading through traffic and making calls, spending 3-4 hours a day in the hospital visiting my suffering family, and then crashing into bed, utterly alone, in my clothes, lights still on, for maybe 3 hours of sleep, back up at 5 am to race to the hospital and help any way I can before work, and repeat. For 18 months. It was hard. I was hard focusing on work and providing for my family while my daughter was being poisoned by chemo, blasted by radiation, recovering from surgery, nearly dying twice, and whimpering through the pain of immunotherapy for so long. It was the hardest thing I hope I ever have to endure.
Work/Life balance
Lots of Facetiming from onsite jobs when she was in the hospital
But it wasn’t all bad. I saw the “good” in humanity every day, with people reaching out endlessly to voice their support, sending prayers and good vibes and helping prop us up wherever things seemed to falter. I owe a lot to the kindness of strangers. I did a lot of growing, getting to know the real me, and learning how to be human, specifically, how to be more empathic with people. I realized that everyone is going through something, and we’ve all had to persevere through hard times, and have had to rely on others for help. I used to think it was best to hide whatever problems I had in my life, because showing weakness would result in others viewing me as a liability, but it turned out that sharing our weaknesses with others is an important part of social bonding, and by opening up to my clients and colleagues, I bonded to them in a way that made my work and personal life far more meaningful than it ever had before. It’s completely changed the way I approach my work relationships now. And it was GOOD for business. I actually had my best year ever, amazingly, and though it required me to leverage every ounce of social and work credit we had, we got through this dark period intact.
March 2020
As of February 2020, My daughter Kiki is nearly 3, and nearly 6 months out of treatment. We don’t use terms like “cured” yet, it’s just too soon to know. But her oncologist is pleased so far, and we are slowly but surely phasing her into as normal a life as we can manage, enrolling her in dance classes and preschool, and still taking it one day at a time. We’ve recently additionally been blessed with the birth of our new son Robbie, a treasure and hope for new beginnings.
So far, 2020 is off to a rocky start, but not just for us, but for the whole world it seems. Fear of COVID-19 is spreading faster and farther than the disease itself, like a cancer, if you will, causing widespread severe repercussions in every industry, and time will tell how this will shake out. I hope that sharing my story might provide some inspiration to those reading, to find inner resilience, and courage to reach out for support when needed, and strength to adapt and change and grow accordingly to the needs of what may come next.
If my story had you compelled, oh man, this is just the index card version. Our entire saga played out publicly with regular updates on social media via gofundme, facebook, and Instagram. If you would like learn more about that incredible journey, I encourage you to visit our gofundme page (no obligation to donate) for the complete story, and certainly connect on facebook as well, where I like to post about my personal life and interact with our friends and supporters. My Instagram is more art-oriented, but a good third option if that’s your preference in social media.
I wish you and your loved ones well. Stay healthy as best you can.
So here’s a riddle: When are you HAPPY that your favorite binge-able show finally is finally axed? WHEN IT MEANS YOU CAN FINALLY POST your storyboards for the promos!!! I’ve been dying to show these off for a while now. Of course, these were just pitches for promos, and as far as I can tell, none of the concepts I drew were produced, which totally slays me.
I thought these were some really killer concepts, but maybe the client thought we butchered the execution. Ok, enough pun-ishment. Wouldn’t want you to get “board.” Lol!
First board set: Bates’ “Room”; The room seems to close in and crack under in intense psychological pressure:
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And second board set: Bates’ “Stairs”; We follow our hero up a set of stairs and meet our horrific fate:
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That’s some creepy stuff! I hope you enjoyed watching these. BTW, I did all these boards and MORE in a single 8-hour day. What can I say? I really do BLEED for this job! Bwhahahahah!! See you next time….
Lucky me, I got to work with the very talented folks at The Mill earlier this year, and storyboard their cinematic cutscene that they were doing for the new Call of Duty “Extinction” series. It’s a DLC expansion game, I believe, which means it’s a smaller, downloadable game, part of a very popular franchise, and it’s got a very accelerated production schedule. So, they know who to call for storyboards!
These COD projects are tons of fun to work on. I get to draw stuff like monsters, guns, battleships, weird alien environments, and I have a good deal of creative input here too, although that’s probably due to the very tight production schedule. Not enough time to split hairs, creatively!
I’m not a big video game player these days, so I’m a little unsure of the whole big story context, but in this cinematic, we see a paramilitary commander exploring a mysterious cave, coming across monolithic object of alien origin, touching it, and releasing a monster, which wakes him from his “nightmare,” into a hellish vision of the future, curated by an apparition of a woman with special powers he seeks to harness, and she reveals a startling truth, which wakes him AGAIN into actual reality, where he finds himself aboard an experimental navy seacraft, now under attack. He rushes to the medical bay and sees his prisoner, the woman from the dream, helpless and restrained, but nonetheless he suspects her of orchestrating the attack on the ship. He moves to the viewing deck and we see the attacking see monster descending upon them…
Here’s the boards:
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These storyboards were the very first pass I pitched to the director after reading the script. I actually don’t have the finished boards… I have no clue where I put them! It’s possible I deleted them mistakenly. That’s a shame, but it’s still cool to compare my boards to the finished product and see the similarities and differences.
I was trying to think of something interesting to post, and came across some boards I did for this Walking Dead Sweepstakes/Bing commercial. This was kinda fun for me, since I never get to draw zombies; usually my assignments involve drawing healthy, happy people, nothing scary. I’m a fan of the Walking Dead comic book, but haven’t had a chance to check out the show… Anyway, the commercial announced the sweepstakes for the “stagger-on” roll (you get to be a zombie on the show!). The story is, an actress and actor are being filmed eating human remains- only the actor isn’t an actor, he’s really a ZOMBIE, and he’s hungry for brains, but the girl just thinks he’s a really good actor and takes a shining to him. Now at break, she goes to her computer and does a Bing search, and then the Zombie does his own zombie-search. Then we cut away to a bunch of footage from the show, and then come back for a stinger at the end, where, having returned to the set and resumed filming, the Zombie strikes!
15 Black and white frames, and I had about a day, so that’s plenty of time for black and white. And they were shooting boards, I believe, which means that they can be generally rougher (in theory). So it was kind of leisurely, in one sense, but they needed a quick turnaround, so I didn’t have any time for real research. Just jumped right in. Quickly, my old anatomy lessons began to resurface and I had fun with it. Drawing zombies is easy because if something looks like you drew it wrong, then you actually did it right 🙂 So the project went well.
I never saw the commercial air. That sucks but you can’t watch every TV station at once. But today, I went online to see whatever became of it, and yep, looks like they made it eventually! And they did a great job of matching the boards/script. I love it when I see the commercial air, and especially when the commercial closely resembles the boards I did. Makes the hard work worth it! So you might notice one obvious difference between the stories- at least i did: the computer was replaced with their smartphones! You might say “duh, you should have drawn it that way in the first place!” I did, in fact, mention to the producer, that they should be using their cellphones, and he did agree, but we couldn’t make the change for the storyboards, because the script had taken so long to get approved that nobody could be sure that making that change wouldn’t screw up the production. So I had to draw it with the laptops. But I’m glad they made that change. Other than that, its pretty much spot on!
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