Costume Design

As Studio Art Director, I was available to all of the Producers at Vivendi Universal Games to provide support for their projects. Jeff Barnhart, the Producer for Bruce Lee, wanted to bring Bruce up to the present time and asked if I could give the character a make-over. Ooooh, I like challenges. First I imagined Bruce alive today and what movie roles he would be doing. Jet Li came to mind as an action Kung Fu actor that symbolizes the Bruce Lee ethos. If I was a costume designer for a Bruce Lee flick, I would put him into something he could move extremely well in but also protect him. I also he would be driving a motorcycle, which led me closer to my vision. After scouring motorcycling web sites and collecting a number of examples, I started to develop two different potential styles. One was based on the motorcycle riding gear and the other on an exaggerated oriental - cape look. I wanted to show his body but only a portion. So with that, these concepts were created for the Developer in Japan. I hired concept artist Kenzie LaMar to be my brush and gave him my sketches, the resources that I had collected and my vision. I also wanted Kenzie's contribution, so I gave him artistic license to push the direction as far as he could. He is a wonderful artist and also quite fast. These are just some of the variations on the theme. We dealt with hair styles, glasses / no glasses, helmets, boots or split toed ninja socks and on and on. The design of this particular title mandated that most game play occur from behind the character, so whatever design I came up with had to work from behind. I also had to consider implications to the model’s topology and potential rigging and skinning problems such as the number of bones that would be required to animate the resulting model.

This was the approved design, using a reinforced motorcycle jacket and pants with structural padding on the forearm and shin guards. I kept the color selection to a dark masculine choice accented with red piping. Since this game was to use motion blur for the body action, I chose a contrasting color of white found on the arms and waist band. Kenzie and I came to a compromise with regards to his boots, a hybrid between both the Ninja socks and the motorcycle boots. The finished model for the game is on the left. Bruce also had to look consistent with the other characters (I didn't design them, only Bruce Lee). So my final acid test was to make sure he blended well but always visually looked every part the Lead.