A few years back, Playmates Toys hired me to come up with a complete storyline for its upcoming line of morphable cars. These were toys that were a cross between Transformers and Tinkertoys. They looked like cars at first, but you could unfold them into large robots and then swap out pluggable parts to customize them or even build bigger conglomerated robots out of several of them.
When we started, Playmates had no idea for a story behind the robots or even what to call them. They hired me to provide that. After a bit of back and forth and many tries of getting bits approved by trademark attorneys, I came up up R.E.V.s, Radically Engineered Vehicles, complete with a list of names for the good robots and their robot foes, plus a story that gave them all a good reason to fight a lot and knock pieces off of each other.
Playmates also wanted a comic book, so I hired Max Bertolini to handle the artwork, while I managed the writing and production. Once that was ready, they asked me if I could add animation and voiceovers to it. For that, I hired James Farr (creator of Xombie) to chop up the artwork and manipulate it in Flash. Tim Brown’s bandmate AJ had a sound studio, so I grabbed a bunch of friends and directed the voice recordings too.
Playmates has long since cancelled the line, but they gave me permission to post the PDF of the comic online. I never got around to finding the Flash files for the motion comic and posting them – until today. While going through my office, I stumbled across an old CD with some R.E.V.s files on it, and the Flash file for the comic was on it. I’ve posted the R.E.V.s motion comic now. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did helping make it happen.
