Xiaolin Showdown

I ran across an old file this morning and thought I'd share some random trivia. About eight years ago I worked at a very, very small studio in Pasadena doing content development. Character design, animation, animatics, storyboarding, story, cleanup, game design, etc. It was way too much work for the number of people and projects we were undertaking, and way too much was expected from a handful of novice artists. It's impressive looking back at what we made and how well it was actually executed. None of us knew what we were doing. One of the projects actually made it a few years ago. It's on the WB and it's called Xiaolin Showdown. The poster below is Xiaolin Showdown when it was still known as Naja and the Celestial Rings. It would have been equivalent to Avatar back then, but a little darker over all. I'm glad something came of it, but Xiaolin Showdown is so different. I was surprised. What is interesting is that despite how different the show ended up in tone and style, the general plot is intact. Also, a character that had been designed by Simon at random one day, which we all liked alot and called "Omi Tofu", became the Xiaolin Showdown lead. We had originally been using him to make and deliver pizza in a flash game.

Here's the intro to Xiaolin Showdown:



The image below is a collaboration of work between the four artists at the studio. Frank, Charlie, Simon, and me. I think that the green character, Goat, and the blue character, Ox, were the ones that I had the most fun with. Charlie and Simon mostly did cleanup on this image, importing everything into Illustrator, a very time consuming job. We all worked hard, but those guys worked really hard! Frank and me did a lot of character design and I'd help cleanup characters once we got enough design work finished. I think Charlie did the logo as well.