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This is a short film I directed for the King Of Kong DVD.




I don't know if you're familiar with this movie, but it is great. It's an epic battle of good and evil. It's about Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell for the highest score on Donkey Kong. The movie is really more about the players.

After watching this movie, I think that Weibe deserves the title, BUT I also think the Billy Mitchell is an AMAZING gamer! One of the top of our lifetime. He's portrayed as the villian, but he is still deserves the recognition for his gaming feats. Just to put it into perspective, there probably wouldn't even be competative arcade gaming if it wasn't for Billy Mitchell.

Jon felt that the movie needed some kind of historical perspective of the actual Donkey Kong game, so the short was born.

I sure didn't do this short alone! We were under the gun for this one. We turned it around in 2 weeks--and that's all after hours work! It was a huge labor of love for everyone that worked on it at I Am 8bit Studios:

Written and Produced by Jon M. Gibson
Told by Eric Bauza
Music by 8 Bit Weapon
Designed by Steve Lambe and I
Animated by Tony Mora and I
After Effects by Matt Gadbois

Here's my animatic, just be warned, the whole thing is rough and on yellow post-its.



Every short starts with what is called a color script. This is a way to keep and overview of the whole film's color. It's a way to plan out the intensity and relationships of all the colors in all the scenes in order. Color is SUPER imporant. It basically dictates the emotions in the film--all following the story that is.

"Shiggy" Shigeru Miyamoto. I hope I've done him proud!


I loved designing DK. I must say that I despise the new DK design--ruined by RARE.


Here's some of Steve's Nintendo businessmen:

Thanks again everyone for such a fine job, and especially New Line for paying for it!

Recently we here at Donnell decided that despite our deepest hopes and dreams, floppy disks just aren't gonna make a comeback. So we got around to the nasty business of making certain that they had been thoroughly deleted from the system (they had). In the course of this job, I discovered an old friend. Below the Root, babies. Based on the book by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, it translated into an enormously satisfying video game. I played it for hours on my Commodore 64 and WON (unlike, say, Q-Bert) and lo and behold here it was at Donnell. I was thrilled. If any of you have an old Apple computer, invite me over sometime. We'll break out the joysticks and give it a whirl. It even has the map!

But if you wish to get that old-timey computer interface into your life a different way, I've found that there's a way to make your blog look like a Commodore 64 interface. Everybody say it with me! LOAD, "*", 8,1 and return! If I didn't love you all so very very much I might be seriously tempted to do this. Though, if I'm going to be honest, it would be cool for about 3 days. Then the blue would start to get to me. Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

By the way, I've also found that children's picture book author/illustrator Jarrett Krosoczka shares my love of 80s arcade games. Examine the evidence. He found this place where post-it notes could create a Donkey Kong image and he's also the one responsible for that Q-Bert image I linked to. Bravo to you, sir.