FOOT: Phantom of the Forest

Back Story

This short was the brainchild of my friend Kirk Demarais and the founder of Funko Mike Becker. They wrote a script and reached out to me to animate. It took about a year and a half to finish. This was ‘07-08.

It was hard to work on such a challenging project for that long that wasn’t something I connected to on a deep level. It was fun to come up with character designs and animation ideas, but at the end of the day it wasn’t really speaking to me creatively, so I had to find ways to keep it interesting as I went.

Concept Work

Comic-Con ‘08

FOOT was accepted into the Comic-Con Film Fest in 2008, so we all got free passes to attend. Also, Mike still had a connection to Funko at this time, and he worked with them to create FOOT Wacky Wobblers of my Bigfoot design that included a DVD of the short in the box. I had to make the box design super quickly and had never really done print work before. There is this big printing mistake on all of them that wasnt apparent until I saw it in person on the shelf in the Funko booth. Whoops! (ugh)

That was a whirlwind trip to San Diego. I think Mike kind of lost interest in it shortly after Comic Con and all the unsold Wobblers sat in his garage. He ended up selling them all to this one guy who put them on eBay. You can still find them on there occasionally.