This guy is the demonstration from the most recent Creature and Character design class. Now, we are pleased to announce the first two class sessions for 2011, including a stupidly cheap session of painting demonstrations. Click here to go to the “Classes” page to find out more.

Some of you may have noticed a lack of Monsters of the Day all this week. But why would there be so few monsters this close to Halloween? Schell Sculpture Studio is moving to an exciting new, larger facility in Chatsworth, CA. This week has been filled with lots of hard work and heavy lifting, but don’t sweat, the monsters will return next week. For our students, the new studio will make class-flow easier, which will make for a better experience all around. Once the shop is set up, we hope to provide you with a virtual tour, but in the mean time please bear with us. Communication by phone will be down this weekend but it will return next week. If you need to get in touch, it is best to email us at schellstudio@hotmail.com. Thank you for your patience, and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!

Next April, Jordu will be teaching his Creature/Character Design Workshop at Metamorphoses in Strasbourg, France. If you live nearby and would like to take this course, send an inquiry to class2011schell@hotmail.fr. I apologize that this post is not in French.

In fact anyone who is not in the L.A. area, we have news for you. We will be offering the Creature and Character Design class over the course of five consecutive days starting November 29 and concluding December 3. We are doing this so that out-of-towners can have access to this course without having to interrupt their lives for five weeks. This will also be the first class to be held in or new facilities located at: 21629 Marilla Street, Chatsworth, CA 91311. There are a number of hotels within walking distance. We ask that any local prospective students please wait until September 25 before signing up. This will give our long distance friends ample time to get a seat. If you know someone who has wanted to take this course, but could not manage the five week commitment, please, let them know about this.

You can sign up for this class in our store.

We are happy to announce that Summer sessions are now enrolling, including the first in a series of Advanced sessions. Go to the classes page for details, or head on over to the store to enroll.

The Electric Playground has released a great little interview with Jordu:

You can watch this and other fun stuff over at the Electric Playground website.

I have dealt with a massive storm of controversy lately regarding who did what on the Na’Vi designs for the film ‘Avatar’. This open letter is being posted to clarify, once and for all, exactly what my involvement was in the creation of these characters.
In the Spring of 2005, I was contacted by Lightstorm Entertainment to be involved in the very first design steps towards creating the world of Pandora, the planet that ‘Avatar’ takes place on. There were only four of us in that initial phase (five if you count Martin Laing, the production designer at the time.)

These four were:
Wayne Barlowe, who was to take the initial creature and character design lead on the film.
Yuri Bartoli, a very talented illustrator and designer who I had worked with previously at Tippett Studios in Berkeley, California.
Neville Paige, an imaginative creature and industrial designer who was also a very fine draftsman.
And, me.

We started out working directly at Jim’s house in Malibu, and from the very start, I was frustrated because Jim wanted everything to be designed either on the computer or on paper. Sculpture being my forte, I felt a bit out of place; I design almost exclusively in clay. I can draw, but compared to Wayne, Yuri and Neville, my drawings just weren’t at their level. I tried to impress this upon Jim, but he was adamant: No clay!

After several weeks of trying to make this work, it was clear that I wasn’t cut out for this job, at least the way that Jim wanted it done, and I left the project for about four months. (I was delighted that, after leaving, Jim called me personally and told me that if the need came up for my skills, he would like to call on me in the future.)

Around November of ’05, Jim came back to me, this time frustrated at the inability of the computer to capture the life he wanted in his creatures and characters.

I came back, where designs for the creatures were all well underway under the lead of Neville Paige. The Na’Vi, however, had not been explored very thoroughly, at least not to Jim’s satisfaction. I started by doing a quick bust of the main female character, Neytiri. Jim immediately said upon seeing it, “This is really helpful…yes, this is a good approach.”

Next, Jim gave me a massive stack of photos of various actresses that he felt looked Neytiri-like. These were reference for me, as well as a drawing he had done of her face on toned paper. I did one bust that was an almost exacting portraiture of the drawing, and Jim had me make molds of it so there could be multiples. Next, he wanted a full-body rendition of her. This maquette was based on some very rough computer renderings, all of which Jim was dissatisfied with. His main objective in bringing me on was to get the sense of naturalness he felt existed in the sculptures he’d seen of mine. (Somewhere in all this, I also did a number of sculptures of the creatures as well, based on designs done by Yuri and Neville.)

The full body sculpture of Neytiri was a major success. Jim said, “That’s her.” He told me that I was “incapable of sculpting anything without character”, a very high compliment.

After this, Jim decided that he wanted me to concentrate specifically on the anatomy designs of the characters, and that he wanted Stan Winston’s guys to join the team as the primary designers of the faces and patterns on the Na’Vi bodies. They produced an enormous amount of work, including life-sized busts of the characters, and a full-sized Na’Vi body over nine feet tall. John Rosengrant headed up the team at Stan’s, and Joe Pepe, Chris Swift and Scott Patton all worked on the designs and sculptures being produced there, as well as a number of complex digital assets. They also made molds of all of the maquettes that I had done, and produced painted versions, with the now fully designed faces they had created replacing the rather rough ones I had sculpted. (These painted maquettes can be seen briefly in a “60 Minutes” episode.) Stan’s also produced the life-sized Mech suit (!), as well as a number of maquettes of the creatures for the film.

In the Spring of 2007, my involvement in ‘Avatar’ was drawing to a close, and I left satisfied with the work I had done. Weta Workshop worked heavily on the film as well, of course, producing set pieces, all of the Na’Vi accoutrements, native jewelry, the jaw-dropping animation (along with the legendary ILM) and refined things in the final analysis; the spirit and structure of my early maquettes was still intact in the Na’Vi, however. Unfortunately, I do not believe that my credit on the film reflects my contribution…but at least I can say that I was a major part of this fantastic design team. This is as thorough and honest an evaluation of what happened as I can recall. Let the controversy end now, for the love of Neytiri!

For the next several days, this site will be undergoing some changes in its security settings, as we prepare for a major update. If you get security warnings on any of the pages, please know that your computer is not at risk. At least, it is not at risk from anything we are doing. We can’t speak for the guy looming in the corner with a sledge hammer. Hopefully, we can get all of the changes done shortly, and the site will be back to normal. Thank you for your patience.

The trailer for James Cameron’s long-awaited “Avatar” is online, and you can finally see the creatures of this new world, most specifically the humanoid Navi. Jordu was the lead character designer on these fantastic creatures. From the look of the trailer, they were faithful to his designs. The buzz around this movie has been huge, and the trailer looks astounding. This trailer was downloaded more than 4 million times the first day it was available on Apple Trailers, setting a new record for the site. Look for “Avatar” in theaters this December.

Here are the best of the Steven Spielberg’s Toilet Paper contest entries. If you don’t know what that means, it is high time you start listening to N.E.R.D.cast.

WINNER! Lyle Moore

Aris Kolokontes

Mikey Rotella

Nick Brown

And there is a very special place in Hell reserved for Mike Doran who suggested that Oskar Schindler’s actual list be used as Steven Spielberg’s toilet paper.

If you haven’t checked out our media gallery in a while, you may want to take a look. If you like what you see, go ahead and subscribe to our page on youtube. Don’t forget to leave us feedback and comments. Here is a taste of the newest media:

Click on the “Gallery” link then click on “last uploads”. There are some new images of old things and some new albums of all new stuff. You will not be disappointed.

Good news, fellow nerds. The Summer class session has been altered to accommodate for the San Diego Comicon. We know a lot of you don’t want to miss it, and neither do we. Check out the classes link for full details.

This is what happens to molds when a mask reaches the end of its run. Let this be a lesson to all molds everywhere.

For more information click on the “Classes” link above. Enroll early, because these classes tend to fill up fast.