Artwork and Easter Eggs from the new Warriors Cartoon!
First, if you haven’t seen this cartoon, check it out! And hang around — I promise it’ll be worth it!
The Warriors commissioned this short as a treat for the team before they start back up for the 2016/2017 season. They gave Bleacher Report a list of inside jokes for each team member, and the very, very clever Malamut brothers wrought those jokes into a hilarious (and catchy) song before enlisting my help to do the animatic, background art, and some animation.
Sadly, the Powers-that-Be required some changes before it could be shared with the public, so the cartoon above is NOT what the Warriors were shown. That cartoon is sadly lost to history, BUT (here’s where I make it worth your while) I did obtain permission to share the much bawdier Animatic. Enjoy!
I should note that at the time I finished work on this animatic, the ending still hadn’t been approved, so Craig and Adam covered that last bit while I moved on to other things.
Easter Eggs
I don’t want to piss off the Warriors, so I can’t comment on all the Easter Eggs. But there are a few things I think I can point out that non-rabid sports fans might not otherwise pick up on:
The bridge echoes the Bay Bridge in the Warriors logo, but with spiderwebs for cables. Also the base of the castle is a nod to Oracle Arena and that is the Oakland skyline in the distance. Craig and Adam love to include little details like that. Lastly, if you’ve seen The Nightmare Before Christmas lately, you might pick up on a personal homage I snuck in.
Steph’s shadow in this shot is meant to look like the old Warriors mascot. You know, the weird blue guy with the bizarre Parasaurolophus thing on his head… of course, this is an evil-fied version of it.
The original “Crush your Dreams” bit had this shot of Andre Igoudalia dreaming about golf. Because he and Steph Curry love to play golf, apparently. I thought it was a cool shot, I was sad to see it go.
UnderArmour came out with this pair of sneakers named after Steph Curry that were widely panned as dad shoes. Curry defended the shoes, calling them “fire”. Which I guess is the word all the fire kids use to say “cool” nowadays. I feel old.
Draymond Green was famous for fouling people this way last season. Craig and Adam love making jokes about it. I think it was me who suggested having the players do the Can Can — and they turned it into this joke. These guys are evil geniuses, I tell you.
If you look carefully at the banners, you will see the Warriors’ NBA championships represented, along with a nod to their really really good regular season this year (2016).
The Basketballs in the layout ended up getting replaced with busts of Chris Mullins and Rick Barry. I had fun designing their caricatures — two very distinctive looking guys.
We had a good laugh over this layout. Too bad they had to put shorts on the players in the end…
Sketches of Rocco (Klay Thompson’s dog) — one of two characters I designed for this film The other one (below) was cut. All the main characters were designed by David SanAngelo.
Directly above is Vinny — the character I designed that got cut. He’s Anderson Varejao (the guy with the hair)’s trainer — the joke was how small he looks compared to Varejao. I’m not sure but I think he was cut because most people wouldn’t know who he was. They replaced him with Ian Clark.
More Art!
Thumbnail sketches for Shot 1
Some thumbnails of Steph Curry. The heads are not drawn on some of the poses because in Flash, the head is a symbol you can move around… so there was really no need to draw it over and over — unless the expressions are what you are actually thumbnailing as in the lower example.
I have to give a massive shout to the Malamut brothers, Craig and Adam, who conceived and executed this whole idea. They even did the voices! They wrote the friggin music! And Craig’s thumbnails made my job on the animatic a breeze. Well… as breezy as a deadline like that can be…which is to say… still pretty hard actually… but so much fun. So guys, if you’re reading this, thanks again!
Still here? Thanks for stopping by! Obviously you enjoyed it so please like, share and all those things. Cheers!
Richard Silvius 