My First European Design Credit for Characters!

*COVERART - Coverdesign by Ingunn B. Engen
** Characters developed by Eugene R. Young, Lily Vazques, JR Fletcher & Ingunn B. Engen

At last! About a year ago, a dear friend and former classmate at AAU approached myself and several others about working on an animated music video for a rock band in Norway. I was asked to handle the design of the four band members as characters for the video, while others would work on storyboarding, animation, additional characters and layouts. Although the animation project didn't make it to completion, the band agreed to include some of the original concept art, including my character designs, to promote their next album.

Fast-forward to now: March 15 will mark the release of Phone Joan's new single, "Crybaby" with the four finalized versions of the heads of the Phone Joan psychomechanical automatons. Concept artist JR Fletcher reworked the hairstyle and overall figure of the bassist, and animator Lily Vazques gave the drummer an even cooler look. My design of the guitarist remained the same, while Ingunn turned the lead singer and keytarist into a supercharged rock vixen. There's nothing like seeing a project come together with this kind of team work, trust, and cooperation. It was also exciting to see my original concepts improved upon.

Rumor has it that there might be an artshow in Norway later this year featuring all of the concept art for the project from beginning to end. This will hopefully include work from other artists who didn't get to see their designs animated. In the coming days, I will be hammering away on an illustration to go into a companion booklet for another song from the up-coming album. Right now, I'm awaiting approval from my first batch of thumbnails.

This will mark my first international design credit for character design. Hopefully, I'll be cleared to share the sketches that went into the project soon. I was also thinking of how cool they'd look as posable action figures.

Show the band some love and like them on Facebook, add them to your Spotify playlist and buy their music! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Phone-Joan/296676174032