People who know me, will likely remember the first big series I worked on with my friends at M'Guphynn Media. Nerdvana the Web Series started back in 2016 and I still remember hearing from our director Tito Guillen that he had first found out that we got our first grant when he was on a plane flying out of Fort McMurray during the 2016 wildfire. While it was a tumultuous time for all of us, the thought of getting back home and filming was something we all looked forward to.
Fast forward to August of 2017, our pilot episode was finished and released and on the 21st we found out that we got funding through Telus Storyhive to make our little pilot episode into a full blown series. One of the big challenges we faced during the prep phase for the series was making sure we weren't violating any copywrite laws. Filming in a functional comic book shop made this especially difficult because we were surrounded by brand names from wall to wall. Our solution was to develop some of our own "fake" brand names internally as well as putting out a call for some volunteers to make some for us to use. We would get these brands printed and cover the existing stock with our made up brands.
One of the first designs I made was a Nintendo cartridge for Duke of the Swords, which was originally discussed to be a setting for one of the episodes, but it instead was something that the character Steve would reference as one of his favourite series in the show.
This design never actually made it into the series, but it was used in some of the marketing material on the social media page for Nerdvana the Web Series. This was not the only nintendo cartridge design I had made. One of the character Evil Ash was used on a shirt the team printed and wore to San Diego Comic Con in an attempt to drum up some more hype for the series before the launch.
And I made a few other Nintendo based graphics, this is one was a label for an NED cartridge for a game based on 'War of Kings' which Steve Reeve developed as a setting for episode 6, loosely inspired by Game of thrones which was very popular at the time.
There were some other logos and pieces that were left unused for the most part, or they were in the background in small amounts. Here are some of the other bits that you may not have seen.
This was a play on the Hasbro logo at the time with Brodie's name inserted, Brodie was the name of our stunt coordinator for the show.
A Mattel parody with my name and Tito (the director of Nerdvana: The Web Series) combined into one.
ERF became BERF, but this was another logo we never ended up using.
There were many more designs I could get into that were either used as background set design or not used at all, but I'll same that for another post. That isn't even touching on the fact that there was at one point a video game in development. Stay tuned here for more.
