No Heroics: Trailer, Official Site, and Promotional Artwork

Following on from my initial posts last week about ITV's forthcoming sitcom, No Heroics, there's a bit more news (and artwork) to reveal to you now.

Firstly, the official ITV site is now online.

You'll find the trailer on there, but being ITV, you have to sit through two ads first, so your best bet is to head over the youbiquitious youtube.

At 2 minutes and 30 something seconds in you get to see a glimpse of the sticker I designed for The Hotness, as played by Nicholas Burns, and held up by James Lance (Timebomb). Which is kinda cool.



For the show itself, apart from the Hotness and Excelsor (played by Patrick Baladi of The Office fame), all the other stickers were for made up characters. Later on, ITV commissioned me to produce stickers of the 3 other main characters for promotional purposes, namely Electroclash (Claire Keelan), Timebomb (James Lance), and She-Force (Rebekah Staton). You can see those in the superheroes section of the official site, and also right here:

I could show you, but...

It's been a busy summer, and I've been working for various direct clients and agencies, even managing to squeeze an ear-infection-induced fortnight off just as I was about to take my first real break of the year. But hey, I love to be busy, and I love having a wide range of projects on the go to keep the energy flowing, so I ain't complaining. Well, I shouldn't be, anyway!

The point is, that amongst all the work that I'll be able to show you soon, there's another project I've been involved with that I probably won't be able to show you anytime in the near future. If you've seen my recent No Heroics posts, you'll know that for that project I was contacted first by Dick Lunn, who amongst many other things, was art director on Hot Fuzz. Dick got in touch again last month to see if I've be interested in producing another illustration for him, this time for Working Title. Specifically, it was for a test shoot for the movie Paul, which you may know is Simon Pegg's and Nick Frost's next shared project. It's also going to be directed by Greg 'Superbad' Mottola, and according to IMDB, it's "about a pair of geeky British friends who travel to a comic-book convention on the West Coast".

Naturally I was thrilled to be asked, and it got me thinking once more about the good times that Spaced brought me and many of my friends almost ten years ago now. As I say, I can't show you what I did, or tell you anything about it (at least until the movie is released), but I can say that it was a blast. At the moment I have no idea if it will appear in the actual movie, but it was certainly used in the test shoot, and that's quite exciting enough for me right now thank you very much.

No Heroics: Stickers

This is the third of three initial posts on No Heroics, a forthcoming ITV2 sitcom which I produced several pieces of artwork for earlier this year. Produced by Tiger Aspect productions, the six episode series airs from September 18th 2008. It stars Nicholas Burns (Nathan Barley), Patrick Baladi (Neil from The Office), James Lance (Teachers, Saxondale etc), Claire Keelan (also Nathan Barley) and Rebekah Staton (Pulling, Doctor Who).

While we were working on the illustrations and designs for the set, another ongoing priority was to create a set of stickers for use in one of the episodes, ie to actually be focused on by the camera. Without giving the story away, the idea is that within this world, kids can buy stickers of the heroes, much as they would with footballers or Naruto or whatever is hot right now. So as well as illustrating a couple of the actors for said stickers, I also had a list of cleared names that I could work from. In the end I created twelve stickers for the episode, and I've showcased a few of them below. In addition, I also designed the format for the stickers, which are really more like trading/top trump cards I suppose, and the Fanini logo. Excelsor's card was given a foil finish, much to The Hotness' chagrin...


It was cool to be handed a bunch of them when I visited the set at Ealing studios, and the playground memories of 'got...got...need...need' came flooding back. Although I have to say that the only sticker book I ever finished was for the Transformers cartoon series - my Mexico '86 collection remains sorely lacking to this day...

Oh yes - thanks to Alex Amelines for Detonator's pose! That's all for now on the show, but I have more artwork to reveal over the next few weeks once the show is aired...

No Heroics: Set Artwork

This is the second of three initial posts on No Heroics, a forthcoming ITV2 sitcom which I produced several pieces of artwork for earlier this year. Produced by Tiger Aspect productions, the six episode series airs from September 18th 2008. It stars Nicholas Burns (Nathan Barley), Patrick Baladi (Neil from The Office), James Lance (Teachers, Saxondale etc), Claire Keelan (also Nathan Barley) and Rebekah Staton (Pulling, Doctor Who).

My first job was to start creating artwork for the set, a classic British pub which is a little bit rough around the edges. There were a number of ideas for this, and essentially I had a quota of images to create in order to populate the space.

At the core of this was the idea of doing some fake comic covers from different eras. Specifically the idea was to reference 2000AD, as the logo pastiches clearly show! A Pull List, it turns out, is the shortlist of comics that a fan will put aside to read first from their weekly haul. The characters in the bottom one (Velvet Veil and Rampart) appear towards the end of the series, and are played by Julia Deakin and Clive Russell (yes that's Marsha and Damian Knox from Spaced - yay!). And yes that's me looking rather smug on set a bit further down. In fact all the set photos you'll see here were taken in February when I went down to visit the Ealing Studios set during filming:


Next up, I got the chance to design the backboard of a pinball machine, featuring Patrick Baladi's character, Excelsor. Just a subtle little indication that he's doing rather well for himself and has his own line of merchandise:


We also needed some fake classic beverage ads. I didn't design the labels, but had the idea of doing a Watchmen inspired take on the famous 'lovely day for a Guinness' poster (Niteowl - geddit?!) for Moore's Old Peculiar (brewed in Northampton, naturally). Watchmen is a key influence on the premise of the show, dealing as it does with how 'normal' people would behave if they had super powers. For Ditko's Origin Ale, the Spider-man reference couldn't be helped, and the tagline seemed like a perfect way to advertise the mysterious ale, and Mr. Ditko himself:


Of course, none of this stuff is filmed directly, but hopefully little bits and pieces will be viewable in the background. I'll post a few screen grabs from the show when I've got my hands on a copy - I've yet to see any of the episodes!

While we're talking about the set, I wanted to show you a few additional pieces. As you can imagine, when working on such a large body of work in such a short timeframe, some things just end up working better than others. For instance, the plan had been to produce a 'wall of fame', with various signed portraits of random heroes scattered over the place. But somehow this just didn't sit as well with the dusty British pub and would have felt more in keeping with an American Diner. That said, I'm still pleased with some of the work I did, and thought you might fancy a peek. The robot Pull List cover does feature in the show though, so I'm told...


Finally, another piece that everyone liked, although never quite made the final cut, was this highwayman character, an old-fashioned antihero, not a million miles away from Batman. In fact the creator Drew Pearce liked this one so much that he hopes to get him into series 2, should that ever happen:

No Heroics: An Introduction

This is the first of three initial posts on No Heroics, a forthcoming ITV2 sitcom which I produced several pieces of artwork for earlier this year. Produced by Tiger Aspect productions, the six episode series airs from September 18th 2008. It stars Nicholas Burns (Nathan Barley), Patrick Baladi (Neil from The Office), James Lance (Teachers, Saxondale etc), Claire Keelan (also Nathan Barley) and Rebekah Staton (Pulling, Doctor Who).

In terms of my involvement, there's quite a lot to go through, so I wanted to set the scene first.

Just before the end of 2007, I was contacted by Dick Lunn about possibly being involved with this new show about a group of British superheroes who spend a lot of the time in the pub, and aren't necessarily all that, er, heroic. It sounded like an interesting take on the Heroes format, injected with a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy, depending on how you look at it) dose of British cynicism. Dick was the art director on Hot Fuzz (his credits also include the IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Black Books), so I was hardly going to turn the opportunity down. Although I should say at this point that it's Jenny Bowers I need to thank, a colleague of Dick's on Hot Fuzz. She'd seen the poster I illustrated for Edgar Wright, and had recommended me for the show. Thanks Jenny!

In the first week of January, I then sat down with the creator and writer Drew Pearce, the art director Victoria Burnett, and Dick Lunn (who was took the reins as production and set designer for the show), at Tiger Aspect Productions in Soho. Casting was taking place at the time, with a lot of the main roles having been decided. It turned out that I was needed to help bring the set to life with some comic and superhero inspired artwork, and to produce other pieces of artwork which would appear directly in shot in a couple of episodes. It was clear that at the heart of the show was a real love for comics and the genre in particular, with plenty of relatively obscure references being thrown around. Having spent the last few years creating portraits in both personal work and commissions, this really was an ideal project for me. So from January through to April, I was working hard on several illustrations for the show. Which I'll start to show you in my next post...

Nickelodeon Artwork

A little while back I was contacted by the good people at Mind Orchard, who wanted me to work on a project for Nickelodeon with them. What they had planned for the 2008 version of Nick's Big Trip sounded like fun, so I was happy to get involved. Specifically my job was to create the background artwork for the parallax-scrolling, panoramic world they were creating. I love the attention to detail that this kind of job entails, and that's what you can see below. Mind Orchard then built within and around the artwork, adding games, information and generally just tons of content to the site that helped them win a few awards last year. Hopefully this version will prove as successful for them, and I was pleased to be able to contribute.

A Darker Knight (and an Illustration to Celebrate!)

You wouldn't have to be much of a fan of cinema, and comic adaptations in particular, to be hugely excited by the prospect of The Dark Knight, with Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale returning as director and lead actor respectively, three years after the majestic Batman Begins. Beware if you've not seen the movie yet as some small spoilers follow in the text...

I was lucky enough to see it at the IMAX in London the second day of release, and was really glad I made the effort, with six scenes having been shot with IMAX cameras. It really did feel like a huge cinematic event, and there's no denying that the movie is almost relentlessly intense, and as dark and 'adult' as anyone could have hoped for. Go and see it at the IMAX if you can.

Of course what's interesting is that we've had all the hype about Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker, and the tragedy of the young actor's untimely and tragic death, but however wonderful he is (extremely wonderful by the way), in the end the movie is really all about Two-Face, and in particular how The Joker proves his macabre manifesto by essentially creating him. I'm not the first to point out the paradox this creates with the plot arc (including Mark Kermode), although overall I still loved seeing all this up on screen, and didn't find the 2.5 hour run time an issue.

Somehow this time I felt it was harder to identify with Bruce Wayne/Batman though, which was strange considering all the great work they did in the last movie. I wonder if seeing a new Wayne Manor under construction, or an improved batcave in the pipeline, would have helped tie it all together more satisfyingly. Especially as this was used as the final 'beat' to the last movie. Still, it's a small point. The main thing is that the Dark Knight showed the world that a grown-up comic book adaptation can be done. And our hero didn't have to go into a jazz club with an emo haircut to prove it, Mr. Raimi.

There's no doubting that the Joker is one of the greatest ever comic book villains, and it was fascinating to see how he was thrown onto the screen here without any attempt to explain his origins. Immediately he just fits into this notion that he's both the same as, and the opposite of Batman, and it was great to see this relationship explored.

Before seeing the movie, I had been reading The Killing Joke again (written by Alan Moore), and a few days after the movie, I had this idea for an illustration which was inspired by both the graphic novel and the new movie. Brian Bolland opens The Killing Joke with these beautiful panels of rain which set the tone perfectly for this extremely cinematic novel. Then after seeing The Dark Knight, you realise that the Joker is always going to haunt Batman, in the way that he hopes to haunt his own enemies. While trying to get to sleep with an ear infection, the following illustration just jumped into my head somehow, with The Joker's face distorted in the puddles behind Batman. It's not so much that he's actually there, more the idea that Batman is seeing him there as the neon light and the rain plays tricks on the pavement. Enjoy!