In 2016, I had the amazing opportunity to design the art package for the Jetsons pinball machine (produced by Spooky Pinball for the Pinball Company). I got to know Charlie Emery at Spooky Pinball and he helped me realize how hard it is to make a pinball machine! Pins have art on every inch of them, and it is a really interesting cross-section of illustration, storytelling, and graphic design.
Below are all of the process files that I saved from the making of the Jetsons pinball art package. This first batch of files are the different sketches that I did for the translite and the playfield. I was really committed to doing this whole art package by hand. In retrospect, I would have done it on the computer so that I could have easily isolated and edited elements as needed, but, also, so that I didn't have to draw it SO BIG! The last image in this first gallery is a picture of me projecting the sketch of the side cabinet onto AT SIZE paper.
This next batch of images comes from the assets that I made for the DMD animations. We didn't have access to the raw animation assets to make all of the necessary pinball animations (ball lock, end of ball bonus, ball save, etc), so we needed to make it all by hand. I provided storyboards for different ideas of some of the animations (not all of them made it into the game). Those are followed by some images of the original art I made for animations assets, and then a couple examples of what that art looked like colored in. You'll notice that some of the figures have detached limbs. This is so that the animator (the wildly talented David Van Es) could animate the figures like paper dolls.
I took a minor in storyboarding in college, and getting to work on the animations was a great way to exercise those muscles. Remaking animations that we could have probably pulled from the show was frustrating at times, but it really gave me a holistic view of the vast amount of work that goes into making a pinball machine...well...work! This last file is an audio file that I made of test callouts for the game. Obviously, there was no way that we were going to get a licensed character voice to do callouts, so I suggested that we use George's computer, RUDI, as the narrator of the game. Rudi has a fun voice that I thought I could emulate well, so I just recorded some lines to see if there was interest. There was not, but I saved the file for posterity. Do no judge me harshly :)
| Jetsons Callouts.mp3 |
| whos_that_baby.pdf |