day 26: the baroness

The Balinaka Baroness

Story time! Are you wondering why this blog is called Blog o' the Baroness? The easy answer is that I am a Baroness. But how did that happen? Regardless of your sincerity of interest, I am going to tell you. Also, this will wrap up the little walk down Lucas Learning memory lane.

Back in 2002, life was a little crazy. We (at Lucas Learning) were still reeling from the economic fallout of September 11. The CD-Rom market had dried up; we were exploring what sort of business models would work online for educational software. We discovered we couldn't use our ace-in-the-hole: the Star Wars property. That was the domain of starwarskids.com. So where did that leave us? Nowhere, actually. After going from a 65+ employee company down to 30ish and then to 14, we finally got the word in the spring of 2002 that Lucas Learning would go into "hibernation." Those that still remained were laid off. This actually left me in a great position to barrel full-steam into pursuing a freelance career, which I did.

I jumped into working on a children's book portfolio since all I really had was game art and concept art. But sitting at home alone all day, I kind of started to go into Star Wars and co-worker withdrawal. So I signed up on one of the Star Wars Fan Forums. But first, I needed a name. I'm terrible at names.

Backtrack to Anakin's Speedway, my first project. We had three planets for the podraces. I had been looking through any and all Star Wars reference books looking for characters for the planets. It was in some obscure Star Wars role playing book that I found these crazy polar bear people things that lived in the snow called the Balinaka. We put them on our ice planet. They would pop out of the snow when you flew by and do a Snoopy dance. They were one of my favorite things in the game.

Dance Balinaka, Dance!

So I thought a name with Balinaka would be good. And cool character Lando Calrissian was a Baron, so The Balinaka Baroness was born. See image at the top of this post.

That was all well and good, and I enjoyed hanging out on the boards and meeting people and chatting Star Wars. After a while I was referred to as just Baroness. I don't think anyone else had a clue what a Balinaka was, plus that was maybe a mouthful and a pain to type.  (Remember: bad at names.) Then one day I stumbled across (no idea how other than I spent way too much time online) one of those Buy a Real British Title sites. I immediately needed to buy one. But I held off, cause really, what a super silly thing to waste money on. But the idea wouldn't leave me alone, and late in the middle of the night, like all good impulse buys, I bought myself the title of Baroness. Now I was officially a fake Baroness instead of just a fake fake Baroness!

All hail the Baroness!

This certificate currently sits in a lovely velvet-matted gilded frame on my fireplace mantle. It came with a booklet of how to use the Title to my advantage: better seats at restaurants and other perks of fine living. I think there even was a card I could keep in my wallet. Because that would surely convince people I was part of the gentry. heh. I choose to use it to claim my little Barony of a blog, my tiny little corner of the internet: the Blog o' the Baroness.

Very sincerely yours,
The Baroness.

day 25: podracer popsicles

I mentioned yesterday that I used to work at Lucas Learning. I started there in the fall of 1998 when everyone was in the thick of working on Episode One. I was the Lead Artist for the 4-6 year old podracing game that ended up being called Anakin's Speedway (working title was LLLCoolJ).

One of the things we did early on was a lot of kid testing. I made these puppets and we took them to a school to let the kids play with them. All the kids liked Anakin the best, mostly because he was the only human. They didn't love Ben Quadrinaros as much as I thought they would. They did like Sebulba as he was obviously a bad guy and cool. I thought they'd like Mawhonic. He was super friendly waving "Hi." But the kids all hated him. Like really really hated him. We finally worked it out that they found it super creepy that he had three eyes.

And since I know you're dying of curiosity, we picked Anakin, Sebulba, Gasgano and Ben Quadrinaros as the main characters for our game. I think Ratts Tyerell and Teemto Pagalies were runners up but cut for time. Btw, Boles Roor is a big fan of the karaoke. No lie.

day 24: old-school 3d illustration

Look what I found! This is the kind of stuff I was doing when I graduated from BYU. I love the constellations, well...the mythology of them. I actually took Astronomy at University thinking we would learn the stories and how to identify the constellations. Luckily I did alright with the physics, but all that math was definitely not what I was envisioning. I sometimes have these weird lapses of logic.

On a side note, I also just found the sketches I did of a revised more accurate constellation sky. I had started building a second more elaborate version of the above but never finished. Hmmmm.

Butterball and the Troll Hag. One of those gruesome old tales where cherubic children get eaten for wandering into the forest. For some reason the Troll Hag would carry her head under her arm and stuff her neck with twigs. Why? Who knows why Troll Hags do the troll hag things they do.

 

From 1998 to 2002 I worked at Lucas Learning. Such a great little place to work, I loved it. One of our producers was expecting her first baby and ended up on bedrest for a good portion of her pregnancy. I was charged with making a we-miss-you-best-wishes-etc gift. Since Julie was a Shoe-a-holic and we were working on an Episode One game, this is what I came up with.

So there are some samples of my old illustration style before totally switching to digital. I'm happy to have found these, it's reminding me of ideas I still want to execute. They are definitely back on the To-Do list... after the latest batch of deadlines is done. And maybe a trip to Vegas.