Shrek's house. Early concepts.

Shrek first lived in a garbage dump near a human village called Wart Creek. At one time it was thought that he lived with his parents and kept rotting fish in his bedroom. Here are more of my early concepts  for the first Shrek film, circa 1996/97.

Most of us, if not all of us, were used to designing for flat 2D animation. It seemed to me that our gouache paintings, delightful as they were, with their brush marks and paper textures, were not going to get us near to the CG look that Shrek was going to have so I started building models, photographing them and working with them in Photoshop. Using Photoshop was a fairly new concept in those days though I was by no means the first to do so.

Shrek. The first one, that is.

With the fourth Shrek movie soon to be released I thought I'd dig out some of my old concept drawings from around 1996/97 when I was working on the first Shrek movie in LA, before it moved up north to PDI. Yes, it really was that long ago. The Art Department was just learning how to use Photoshop 2, there wasn't a digital camera in sight and I don't recall seeing too many cell phones, if any.

These are landscape ideas for Shrek's world. We didn't have a Shrek or Donkey model at this stage and there was a fad for making drawings brown. These were done in black and white with pencil and then colorized on the photocopier. I'll publish more when and if I can find stuff.