In most cases, George would be pretty angry at having done CG work that ends up not being used for the movie, but that giant snowball was really one of the easiest jobs he’s ever had for a CG model. It involved ‘add basic shapes>sphere’, ‘add noise’ and ‘set color>0/0/0’…five minutes, counting 4 min. 30 sec. of coffee break. (Also note that George is apparently left-handed, and even has an inverted keyboard. I did that on purpose, because it’s … uh…lots of important for his characterization. Right. … OK, it’s not. The panel was originally the other way round, but I flipped it for composition reasons.)
Saying that Lee was accident-prone is a bit of an understatement – in fact, he seems to attract all the free-floating unluckiness within 50 miles around him. Small wonder he would start to seriously contemplate his place in the grand scheme of things at some point. Confronted with contradicting claims from different religious groups, however, he thought he’d better be hedging his bets by simultaneously worshiping as many deities as he could get his hands on. Naturally, he would not normally adorate the backside of his little combined idol, but I wanted both him and the idol to face out of the panel. And if you wonder about the rather rustic background in panel three, that’s the inside of Lee’s trailer, which the production bought used from a livestock transport company.
There just is something uncanny about blue gels. All major lighting disaster are caused by blue gels, and I also suspect them in the sinking of the Titanic. No other colour of gels ever causes any problems. For that reason alone, a ‘Smurfs’ live-action movie sounds like a colossally bad idea.
As a sidenote on panel five: Actually, every day is a butterfingery day for George Geekish. He has butterfingers, he eats Butterfingers, so what do you expect?
Don’t worry about Lee – they managed to carve him out of that snowball within a couple of hours, so he only got a severe hypothermia and adherence to a couple more deities out of it. And the production even managed to score a few news items with their press release: ‘Lee Hung Gai – the coolest actor in Hollywood’. The story will continue on Monday, please vote.