The Origin of Shardplate — Intentionally Blank Ep. 260

Brandon is joined this week by special guest Ben McSweeney, one of the creative directors at Dragonsteel. Join them as they explore Ben's history, from working in animation and television, his role at Dragonsteel, and his advice for today's up-and-coming artists.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Hello, Ben McSweeney. Hi, boss. What's happening, Captain? He always calls me boss. You're the one who calls me that. You've called me that since like the first few times we met.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I do. It's like a an affectation almost, but I do remember that I think it was probably Joel who called me out for it when he was like six. Oh, yeah. So he was just like, why do you call my dad boss? I'm like, because he pays me money to do things.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

So Ben McSweeney, you may know. I'm talking to the audience now. You may know him as the um artist of the Shallon sketchbook pages, going all the way back to Way of Kings. He is one of the artists here. You are one of the very first artists I ever hired. You're the first artist I hired that I didn't know about that. And Isaac comes first, but yeah. Yeah, actually, Jeff Career is the person I hired to do the Launch map before I even knew Isaac. So he's first and then Isaac to do Mistborn. But Ben had done some really fantastic fan art for Mistborn. And when I was looking to pitch Way of Kings in 2007, this is only two years after my career started, I was looking for someone to do concept art for the pitch on the Way of Kings. And I think I went to like three people and I asked them about doing concept art. And Ben was the one that got back with like a professional, like he was timely and he said, This is what it'll cost, and this is what I can do. And the others were really flighty.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

And you were like, and I need to pay you more than that because you're not charging enough.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

You didn't charge enough, and I I upped your pay. Yep. I had wheel of time money then. So they were paying me well enough that I could pay the artists. Like my first piece I commissioned, I think I only commissioned for a couple hundred bucks. But what you did for me, the first thing, was the pitch for Stormlight. So this is character sketches of Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar, and Yasna. He was called Marin back then. Yeah, he was called Marin. I hadn't changed his name yet.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, and uh there was Dalinar, yeah. There was uh it was Shallan. Did we do a Yasna back then? We did a Yasna. We did the famous Zeth.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

We did a Yasna because the iconic Zeph. Yeah, because Yasna looked too much like a witch the first time. That sounds familiar. I'm like, can we make her a little less like a witch? Uh a little more like a like a Chinese gentlewoman. Sure. And that's the Yasna that we ended up with. But those five pictures I took to Tom Doherty's office in the flat iron building in New York.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

I remember.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

And I'd put them on like a cork board as I did my pitch for what the Way of Kings was and why he should make it the next big series that Tor was gonna do. And uh you did that, and then concept art on the plants and things too, I think.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Yep, we'd also did uh we developed the chull and the axe hound. Yeah. And I think you said it was when I got the axe hound right that I was locked in.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Because I made the lobster look cute. You made the lobster look cute. Yeah. Really cute. To make the lobster look adorable and make it a puppy and kind of a dog. And then yeah, we had a lot of fun with the plants and the chull. The chull was the other one that was one of the very first ones we did. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

And that was, like I said, 2007. It's been 2008. Okay. 2008.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

I know because I had dates on the artwork, so that I can actually track back. All right.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

So yeah. So almost 20 years. Yeah, not quite, but almost. We're getting there. So back then you had like a career in lots of different places. When did we hire you full-time? So there was fake full-time first.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

There was fake full time. Well, there was so in 2008, I did the work for Way of Kings with you. And at that time, I was working in boutique animation, which is working with a small studio called Humoring the Fates. And we made TV commercials and we made music videos and we made pitch animations and we made all kinds of small stuff with a tiny little tight crew. And then in 2011 or so, I went and transitioned into a brief but beautiful year in video games, where I worked as a cinematic director on Darksiders 2 with Vigil Games. And from there, I went into television animation, which is actually backwards. Most people work in like mainstream TV and then they go into boutique. I worked in boutique and went into mainstream TV. And I did that for about seven years, and then COVID happened and they sent everybody home. Nobody could work in studio. And everything kind of flattened out. And at that point, like all clients were kind of the same. A job was a job. And ISIC wanted me to do more work with you guys. And so that's when you put me on a full-time contract.

SPEAKER_03 4:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

And you became, instead of being my favorite client that I worked with like once or twice a year, which I loved the fact that, like, oh, once a year. So Brandon comes to me and he pays me a couple of grand and he puts me in a book. It's fantastic. But then yeah, all of a sudden I was full-time and you were asking me to do a lot more stuff. And then about two years ago, I moved down here to become an art director with you guys. So now I am a creative art director at Dragon Steel.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

I guess it wasn't fake full-time, it was, but there was some weirdness with the employee contract that you had to be like a contractor because you were living in Canada. Yeah. So we yeah. And so you were full-time, but you weren't like W-2 full-time. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

I mean, I was still self-employed throughout all those years, but I had, you know, one primary contract and one primary client uh who was bringing me the massive majority of my income. And at that time, and then I would pick up a couple of other jobs here and there. Like I continued to do work with McClellan every so often, but I was working with Brian and a couple other people just to make it look like I had more than one, you know, good boss. But yeah, that was for uh about two, three years that I was just a contractor. And you came out two years ago? 2024, yeah. 2024.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Yep. Interesting. I find this fascinating because the first interaction I ever had with Ben was one of the Dragon Steel Secret Santa's. Yep. And Ben happened to Donald. He got me and he sent me a Gundam model kit because it he was like the only person who knew what it was. And that was when I remember you being like, oh yeah, I'm in Canada. I was like, well, my favorite employee is all the way in Canada. I'm the only person who knows what Gundam is. You made me so happy and so sad all the time.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

It's also Donald's fault because after I got him a tiny little gunpla kit, and I was like, oh, this isn't very expensive, and it looks like a lot of fun. And now I have like six or seven of them, and they're on my shelves in my office, and yeah, got me back into model kits in a big way because they're a lot of fun. They're a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

Now, Scar wanted us to point out the most famous thing that you worked on.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Probably the most famous TV show that I worked on. I was a lead animator on Rick and Morty, season three, which is the probably the best season. That was the one we won an ME4. Uh that had Pickle Rick and it had Morty's Mind Blowers and Tales from the Citadel. There's a lot of great episodes. And yeah, I was on the Pickle Rick episode as a senior animator, not as the lead animator. I was a lead animator, uh, which means that I like direct other animators in their work for The Vindicators, for Morty's Mind Blowers, and I think those were those two episodes where I was the lead. Everything else I just liked, I would work a couple of scenes as they needed, and I would help out around the corners. I I did some pickle rick scenes. I did Jaguar when he's backflipping over the lasers. I had a lot of fun on that show. It was it was intense, it was a high quality Toon Boom show, but it was super fun. So and yeah, I also was a storyboard artist on The Dragon Prince, which is another show that usually people are pretty impressed to like to hear about. So and I had a lot of fun with that show too. And yeah, I really enjoyed my time in television. But one of the things about working in TV is that you kind of find yourself looking for another job every nine months or so as contracts run out. They put you on hiatus and you got to go find another studio and another new show to work on. And that can get really stressful as you go on through a career. It was hard to figure out where the ceiling was going to be on that and where I was gonna be, you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:28

It's nice to have health insurance all the time.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Well, in Canada, I was well covered. But yes, in the 100%, 401k and yeah. Yeah, there's a I never had a 401k. I was not raised to be financially successful or stable in any way, shape, or form. So yeah, that's been a whole new experience for me late in life is to be like, oh look, I'm not, you know, living paycheck to paycheck anymore. It's fantastic. So Dragon Still takes good care of me.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

One of the things that uh Dragon Still that you might know him for is Ben is really good at taking the weird things in my brain and actually putting them onto paper, right? So our designs of Mist Cloaks come from Ben. All of the weird guns that I come up with, like in the Wax and Wayne books, he's like, all right, let's see if I can draw this out and make it work.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Here's what I recommend all of Wax's weird guns that vindication and the big boom thing with the shot glass size bullets, which yeah, a lot of the technology.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

I'm I'm having a lot of fun working on. I did a lot for Era 3. Just I sat down and said, What about this? What about this? And then so really you do a lot of concept art stuff for us now. Like if we are having like a project where we're hiring artists to do something, right? Yep, even things like the the picture books or things like this, if they're having trouble understanding, because there's a lot of artists out there who like they can paint something amazing, but the word to painting it, there's just like that stumble.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Yeah, that transition from the descriptive to the visual, yeah. Which was something I was prepared for well because of my work in. I mean, I've been doing commercial work and television work and going in from like script to visual is the like the storyboard artists role. But also working with you for the last 15, 16, 17 years, I'd had a lot of opportunities. And it was also just something I really enjoyed doing, like that transition from the imagination to something visual. As a concept artist, it's been much more challenging than I realized it would be when I took on the role. But I'm I'm really loving it. But it does involve doing a lot of iteration, a lot of variation, a lot of simple stuff that we then look at and we determine okay, like here's a bunch of silhouettes or here's a bunch of simple shapes, uh, simple drawings, and we'll be like, okay, that's working, and that's working. None of this is working, so we're gonna take all that and put it off to the side, and we're gonna iterate on this thing next. And you know, you do it as a series of pieces.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

But we'll have you do it, and then we give it to the other artists instead of the other artist, yeah. Ven has done the heavy lifting on what this actually looks like in a not Brandon's imagination space in a 2D slash 3D space. Yeah. Now you have this thing and now you can actually paint it. And it it works really well.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yeah, and background and animation help me with like knowing how to lay out a model sheet, you know. You are kind of the creator of shard plate. I mean, insofar as like you told me what to do, and then I did some stuff, and that was back when we did that first Dalinar. And that first Dalinar illustration is still very much the basis for how we do shard plate designs.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

I mean, all of those designs. Shallon's wearing a Hava with her hand covered. Yasna's got all of the gemstones in her hair and things like we do. Dalinar's got the shard blade and the shard plate. Yeah. Like Kaladin's wearing essentially a bridge four jacket. It's just looser. He's like not wearing it fully on. Yeah, it was more like a long duster, but yeah, it was that same long coat. All those initial designs really became the things. But then shard plate was the hard one.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Shard plate was really tricky. So a normal suit of armor has cloth, it has chain, it has these things that work in the flexible bits, and we couldn't do that. We had to figure out a way to do it with solid pieces all the time. It was gonna be plates only. And what I proposed and what I think we've gone with is the idea of hard and soft plate, which soft isn't soft in any like material sense. It just means that much like a like a snake's belly scales, it bends, it flexes, it sort of chain mail. But even like less like chain mail is very much like uh woven cloth. It's got holes and it spaces, and it can flex. This is more like lames, I think I'm pronouncing that right, that are bands of plate that then can go into the soft places of the hands, and they can get smaller and smaller and smaller, and they can have a little bit of flex, but at the same time, they're still magically hard. And when they're struck and when they break, they they shatter, they don't bend. So, yeah, finding these solutions is I actually have a lot of fun. Like, there's a rule where it's like we try very hard not to conflict with the text. Like, if you write that it's a thing, we're gonna make it a thing. If it's you say it's blue, it's blue. But then you leave spaces where you don't fill in the details, where you don't say what it is, and that's where we can flex and we can play as artists, and where I have a lot of fun being like, okay, well, he didn't say it wasn't like this. So let's try and see how it looks and see if it flies.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

So Yeah, you are still the master of plate and blade. Anytime we're doing anything with like the RPG or tie-ins for figurines and things, they all go across your desk and often will be like, this isn't looking right, and you'll have to like do a drawover and say, no, more like this.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Yeah, I do a lot of work with Brotherwise. It's one of my primary roles is to work with third-party vendors who are doing production artwork on our material. And so that's a lot of uh Brotherwise, it's occasionally other clients. But every week I'm sitting down with Johnny and the team and Matt at the team at Brotherwise, and we're looking at all the artwork that's coming in for the RPG, for Stormlight, for Mistborn, for all the creative stuff they're doing. And I get to be in the somewhat enviable role of being like, that's not what a chol looks like. Um, I know what a cholella looks like. I know more about chol anatomy than anyone ever should because I had to think about it. Yep. And I wanted it to be, and that's one of the things I like to do too, is try and think about these things logically. I want them to make sense, I want them to feel real. And so, yeah, even when it comes to some of the more interesting things that are happening in Mistborn Era 3, where it's like, okay, we're gonna do this, but how can we make it feel solid? And how can we make it feel physical and like plausible?

SPEAKER_02 13:33

What's cool is you often have like pitches for me that these days are getting into the books, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, that's that's always a little scary and a little fun. I will sometimes like I did a bunch of costume designs, and then I got to read read the draft. I'm I'm one of the few I've gotten to read half the draft. But then I saw like a costume description of a character. She's wearing this, this, and this. And I'm like, wait a minute. Yep. I did that. That's what the thing I drew. All right. So that one worked.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yep. So you turn them into me. This is one of the things that's been most fun recently. You'll do just like, here's 30 women's costumes for this. And then I did that many.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Well, I might have done that many.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Yeah, it's more than a lot. It's a lot. And I'll have that sheet open and be like, all right, I'm using this person. Yeah. And I just take them and I use them. That's what I'm for. And that's been really handy. You're also very good at comics.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

I like to be comics, it was one of the first things I wanted to do as like how I got into this. I started taking artwork seriously around the age of 14, 15. I was like, I want to do this. And I wanted to draw comics, not knowing what that really meant or how that industry worked. And this was the 90s, because you and I are of an age. And so this was before webcomics. Uh, it was back when we still drew with paper on pencils and uh pencils and paper. Anyways, but yeah, I've always been really enchanted and fascinated by narrative illustration, by sequential art, by artwork that does storytelling, by that sort of marriage of illustration and story. And so, yeah, I did not end up getting into a comics career because it turned out that comics do not pay well. And it is really hard to make a living drawing comics unless you are very lucky and very prepared. And, you know, I I have gotten to do some really cool comic stuff. I've done some stuff with Howard Taylor. I did some stuff with you and Mitosis. We did that short comic for that.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

If you're not familiar, that's a Reckoners short story that I wrote. We did a comic version of it. I think they're really hard to find now. Yeah, they are.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

I only have like three or four copies of it myself, and that's it. I don't think we have any in the warehouse or anything.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

One of my favorite things that you did was we tested doing a rhythmatist comic. Yeah. And you just nailed that. But then we looked at the economics of it and we're like, oh, the economics of this do not make any sense. I mean, it's a full-time job making comics.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Like, I'm fairly certain that the standard today is still the standard it was back then, which is about a page a day. Yeah. I did work on a longer form graphic novel when I was with humoring the fates that was never published, but it did give me an opportunity to really practice that craft. And I got into a good rhythm where it was like I would start the day cleaning up yesterday's roughs, and I would end the day roughing tomorrow's page so that I would always start the next day knowing exactly what I needed to do, and that way, you know, you get into that. But it would still equal out to yesterday's page gets finished, tomorrow's page gets started, one page every day. And when you want to do like long-form work, that's really like that means working on it for a year. It means working on it for more than a year. It can be very challenging. Even manga where they're famous for doing like 14, 15, 19 pages in a week, that involves a couple of things. It involves often having assistants who are helping you with the production of the artwork. It involves working incredibly sick hours. Like Ichidroda does one piece and he's become probably the wealthiest comics book artist in the world. I really hope he gets to retire in time to enjoy it because I think that man still only sleeps for like three to five hours a night or something.

SPEAKER_03 16:56

Manga is brutal.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

It is brutal, and like the rewards are great, but it's really hard to keep up. And yeah, I love doing comics, but it turns out I really like doing short stories. Although we have done some longer form experimentations, so we'll see how those are going.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

Yeah. So I still want to put comics in era three. I want to sneak those in. So I've told fans about that before.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Okay, I'm never sure what we can talk about. That is still the plan. They will probably still be in a short form, but yes, instead of broadsheets, so the broadsheets were a lot of fun. Isaac and I worked on those together. Isaac did most of the writing. As we went on, Isaac did all of the writing. But I would come up with like ads and I would come up the illustration.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

Did you come up with a hero for all ages? I did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

A Hero for All Ages was a silly thing, but it was the playbill poster that appeared in the corner of the broadsheet.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

For a mistborn play, in world.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yep. And it had like Vin and Ellen like trying to reach each other across a crowd of like action, and like Ellen's being held down by the ska, and Vin's being held down by the Inquisitors, and they're trying to like reach each other. Yeah. Yeah. I had a lot of fun just doing silly things. We also came up with Chocotonic. Yeah. I think I did Chocotonic. I think Isaac did VIF. There was the SUNY pups, you let me do a cartoon in everyone, which was really fun. I got to do a little political cartoon.

SPEAKER_02 18:28

Here's what we should do.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

So yeah, those were fun.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

For the comics, you should have a page of the toys they are trying to sell to the children, like were in the comics that we got when we were kids, where at the back of the comic, there would just be a page of just like stupid trash that you could mail around. Which respects.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Yeah. And stuff. Yeah, I wanted to do. I think we pitched this was as one of the things of like if we were going to do comics, we also wanted to do like fake ads. Uh-huh. Yeah. Like the comic book page. So there might be a letters page. There might be that page. There's a Charles Atlas thing, maybe, where it's like a hero of the beach and you know, pushing down the wimp on the beach, only it'll be very like era or scadrine themed.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

He's using his mind and pushing down on the metals, and he's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

Something like that. Yeah, you can you can learn you'll get a medal.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Learn Alamancy.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Now you can be the big guy too, and the girl wanna hold your hand. So yeah, a lot of those things are still on the docket. It's things that we hope to do and we plan to do. We have a lot of things that we hope to do and plan to do, though. Yeah, I mean, big dreams. There's that intersection between what you want to do and the scope of what we can actually achieve. But we still have time before Ghostbloods hits the streets. Yep. So, and you know, we've got a plan. Isaac and I are looking to make it happen with Dan. I think, you know, it should be something that it should be fun. It'll be the thing that we do instead of broadsheets. Yeah. So it'll be little, I don't know how long they'll be, I don't know how many pages they'll be.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

I have various examples from different eras where we have two pages where it's just a glimpse.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

That would be like the low end of it, I hope. I would like to maybe do like four to eight because there are examples of like old, you know, early Batman, early Bob Kane, or early like Will Eisner, where they were, you know, short sixty-seven pages type things, and then you would fit a lot of them into a single magazine. Yeah. How many we'll be able to actually achieve remains to be seen. So but I'm hoping. So I look forward to it because it'll be a lot of fun. I don't know, even for that matter, that I'll be the one who does the drawing. Right. Because I can only do so much. And I like to one of the things that's been really fun about being in the position I'm in now is I remember what it was like to try and break in. And I remember what it was like to look for opportunities and to want to try and do things. And now I'm in a position where I can sometimes do that, where I can be like, here's a chance for somebody else to shine. Here's a chance for somebody else to have their moment. I've had mine, I'm still having it, but I it doesn't have to be all about me, and I'm happy with that. So I like making it opportunities for other people.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

Let me ask you about that then. When I have had artists on before, I always kind of ask them like, advice for new artists. Like, what does the industry look like right now? What can you tell them right now? AI looming large over this.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

So you've made a very strong point with AI, and I think it's a very valid point, which is if you are using a generator to make images for you, you are not the artist. You are at best an art director working with a very poor client. Like they don't iterate as well as a human does, and you don't really have any uh control over what they're putting out. When I'm directing artwork, when I'm working with the art director, Matt Demino over at Brotherwise, we can't make the artist draw things. We we tell them, we give them a brief, we give them a description, and then they come back with artwork. Now we can say, okay, I need you to not make the miscloak so tangly because we don't like the spaghetti tassels. We we try to put flow into the tassels. Or you know, I need you to get this likeness a little closer to what our models that we provided for you. That's not looking like Kelsey or that's not looking like Vin. My experience, limited as it is with AI, is that it's hard to get those little changes and you can get it to do a lot of things, but you're still kind. Of just like letting it throw things at you. You don't really have a lot of control. The other thing that I think was a very strong point you made, and something I've talked to artists about recently is look, I'm here to do it. I'm here to make the stuff. I like drawing. I like illustrating. I like to make the thing. If I'm not making the thing, why am I? I don't want to do that. I want to make the stuff. I want to be the person whose hands hold the brush. And, you know, as you've said before, like when you are making mistakes, when you are learning and growing, that's you improving. So, you know, even with the stuff that I don't do well, I work to try and do it better. That's satisfying, that's fulfilling, that's what I want to do with my life. I want to do, I want to do the thing. And that's one of the things I would tell artists or anybody really, like, you know, in life, you know, figure out a thing that you like to do that you're gonna want to sit down and do every day. Not what you want to be, not what you want to be called, you know, not the end product, but the process. Because that's what you're gonna do every day. You're gonna sit down and you like to sit down every day and write words. And if someone told you that you were just going to direct the story, but not actually write the story, it's not very satisfying.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

So there are some people for whom that is, editors and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

But yeah, but I think even that that's editors like you know, they want to have something that they can improve upon and add their, you know, their special talent and their skill to making that product a better product, making that artwork a better artwork, making that story a better story.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

So I did open the AA candle words, but let's say AI accepted. What does it look like right now for new artists? What advice can you give them? I mean, from what I can tell, it's pretty rough out there.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

And largely the problem is that AI takes on a lot of the simple early learning jobs that artists grow on. Yeah. My first job as an artist was as a magazine illustrator, and I would do illustrations for kids' jokes, and I would make little mazes, and I would illustrate little science stories for a magazine called Clubsy, which was for tutoring for kids. I did that from 95 to 2000. These days I think that the company I worked for, if they were still doing that, they don't publish magazines anymore. But if they were, they might just as easily pay a fee and see if they could just get generic illustrations from because they were not exactly like it wasn't about my style. It was very much about filling a role and a need. I used to do a lot of low price just commercial work, little t-shirt designs and advertising design and stuff. And I think a lot of that's getting taken away. As an animator, I know that one of the things they work hardest to try and replace is the in-betweener. But an in-betweener is how you get good at being a key animator and how you get good at being a lead and like you work your way up through it. And if you take away that base role, I don't know how you apprentice. I don't know how you apprentice. I don't know how you start. What I tell a lot of kids these days when I talk to them, I actually did a thing recently talking to students, is so some of the most successful moments in my life, those moments in my career where like I can see a turning point happened because I didn't wait for permission and I didn't wait for someone to give me the job. I was just like, I'm just gonna go ahead and like I'm not getting paid anyway. I might as well not get paid and get to do the work. I want to do the work. So I mean that's how I did the stuff for you. It was like, I don't know Mr. Sanderson, he's not paying me to draw Missborn, but I want to draw Mistborn, and I might as well draw it to the best of my ability, and then I'll put it maybe, you know, where he might possibly see it, and then maybe he'll see it. And if he's interested in an artist, maybe he'll want to talk to me. Which happened to work out because I hit you at just the right moment. That was very much a lucky break for me. But also as an animator, I always wanted to do like action sequences and fight scenes and stuff like that. But as a commercial animator, that's not where a lot of the work is. But there was a time, somewhere around six, seven years into my career, where I was like, no one's gonna pay me to draw like samurai guys running around fighting with swords and doing the cool action sequences that I want to draw. I'm just gonna go ahead and make some. And I did. And the people at my studio who saw that were like, we can do something with this. Let us package these into a short film. We'll put a little narrative around it. And we ended up going to San Diego Comic Con that year with a short film in their film festival. And from that, I was able to segue work with Rooster Teeth Productions. We did a little red versus blue animated thing. Wait, you were part of the animatic for the red versus blue anime? So the very it's you can still find it on YouTube. Yeah. There's red versus blue animated. There's a little tiny like three and a half minutes or so, I think, of church and Tucker and them. And they're like assaulting a Citadel type thing and fighting with a bunch of grunts. And yeah, I was the animator. I was a storyboard artist, I was a character designer, because I had to translate the 3D suits into 2D illustrations. Yeah, I was also the guy who designed the original Rooster Teeth logo.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

What? I didn't know.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Yeah, that was so that was a thing in 2003. I was a fan, like they had just gotten started with Machinima, right? So they had fan forums back then, and I was lurking around their forums, and they wanted to transition from a bunch of guys in a college dorm room playing Halo and doing funny voices into like something a little more serious, and they wanted a logo for their company. At the time, they had this like thing made out of clip art, which was like a little silhouette of a Weathervane wincock thing, and then there was like chattering teeth. And they had opened it up to their fans and said, Hey guys, we're looking to do something new, throw in fan entries. And anybody who gets it gets like a I forget what the prize was, but it was something silly small. Here, a t-shirt. Thanks for the I think I was the only artist who said, Look, there's nothing wrong with the logo you have. It says rooster teeth, like it's defining and it's already well known. What you need is an ownable version of that that isn't made out of clip art. And so I did a silhouette of a rooster and a you know, drawing of some cartoon chattery teeth, and that became their logo. That might actually be more than anything I've done, the widest spread piece of artwork, even more than what we've done possibly, because that logo then appeared at the front or the end of every one of their productions for 15 years.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

The big rooster teeth things, they we're talking tens of millions of views.

SPEAKER_01 28:19

Yeah, they got to see a lot, and they had a they had a convention before we did and all kinds of stuff. So, but it was because I had done that for them. Then in 2007, I went to San Diego and they had a table there, and I was like, hi guys, remember me? And they were like, Oh yeah, thank you so much. Here, have some t-shirts, and also we want to talk to you about a thing we want to do. And there's a truism about luck being the convergence of opportunity and preparation. And so every time I think about like a lucky break, it's like, well, okay, that moment came and it was being prepared to try and seize it. So yeah, it worked with you. It worked with them, it worked in almost everything I've done. Like, even when I went from boutique animation into video game animation, I had no experience in video games. I had no idea what I was doing. But I was very lucky that Visual Games at that time wanted somebody who wasn't from the uh video game animation background. They wanted somebody who was from a cinematic, television, storytelling, narrative background. And so even though I had never worked with 3D models, even though I had never worked with video games, I know it was very frustrating for some of the people on that team, but they were kind enough to help me as I was like, I know what I do do well. I know how to compose a shot, I know how to tie a shot together from one shot to the next shot. I know how to make your cinematic moments look like cinematics and not like a bunch of video game animations tied together. There's guys who are very good at like animating action in a game, but they don't necessarily know how to tie shots to shots. And so that was something I was able to segue into.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

That's actually kind of a good wrap-up, right? The convergence of luck and determination and skill and preparation, yeah. Preparation and opportunity. Preparation and opportunity. Ben Sweeney. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks. Yeah, we'll have you back sometime. I'm here every day. So how's that, Ben? Not you, Ben. Other Ben. Still pretty good.