DarenDoc’s Slightly Nifty Musings Inc.

Here’s a glimpse at another 2001 set in 3D… unfinished because a certain project didn’t happen… but interesting nonetheless…

Will Mr. Travers please contact the Met-office?

I thought I’d take a look back at all the stuff I’m scanning from my vast files… and I found some stuff from one of the first movies I worked on… “What About Bob?”.

This was the fourth movie I worked on with production designer Leslie Dilley, after meeting him on “The Abyss”, and then moving to “Exorcist: III” and “Guilty by Suspicion”.  I became an illustrator on “Guilty”, but when I started work on “What About Bob?” the job was basically dealing with designing signage, special props, and general graphic design.  We started out working out of offices at The Culver Studios in southern california, then a few weeks later, went off to set up at Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia.  It was a great time, and a lot of work, as we had a lot of locations to set up and signs to build… and I even got to design and paint a bus.

But the most “famous” thing I designed for the movie was the book “Baby Steps” that plays so prominently in the movie.    This was in the days before computers were used extensively, and a few years before I started using them for work… so I still did things by hand… including lettering… so I did this mock up first… using an old picture of my dad to stand in for Dr. Marvin who hadn’t been cast yet.

My hand done "rough" with my dad's picture.

Then, prop masters Doug Fox and Russell Bobbit took my drawing seperations that I did for each color (since the final was going to be embossed foil) and had them printed.  We used old remainder books of the same size for the prop books, and there you have it!  (they took a picture of Richard Dreyfuss by then, but there was so much lead time to get the book covers done, we had no photo… so when we finally got the picture approved, we had to use color xeroxes that were painstakingly cut out and glued on.)

That will be $29.95 for the book...

After the show was done shooting, I was able to get Frank Oz and Richard Dreyfuss to autograph my copy of the book that I was given.

Frank wrote: “Daren, Thanks for the book cover, now please write the book.” and Richard wrote: “Daren, I’m the guy on the cover.”

Frank Oz and Richard Dreyfuss autographed my book.

I also did a caricature of Bill Murray that he liked so much that he had t-shirts made of it for the whole crew… I still have that somewhere…

Seeing this stuff made me remember that great time in my career.  Some happy memories.

I haven’t disappeared… lol   Much.   Just trying to keep busy and get another gig… such is life…   and in the mean time learning some new things, like zBrush… which is cool… and I’ll share my discoveries and projects with all of you when I can.   Also have been going through old files… (physical, not computer)… and have been scanning old drawings, etc… to share.

watch the skies.