The past year has flown by so fast, the colors are all a blur!
With 2017 came a host of digital production work at Coolfire Studios for one of 2017’s Hot New Toys — of Dragons, Fairies, & Wizards – Fairy Wands and Wizard Wands. In addition to my usual Build-A-Bear Production Design work, I took a front-row seat to the development process of these cutting-edge toys, and created, wrote, and directed exciting content to populate the line’s YouTube Channel and website. I brainstormed with the toy’s development team, wrote concepts & outlines, worked closely with an in-house animator to create storyboards, wrote and art directed several 6-second bumpers (a very effective tool for building awareness), and ultimately wrote and directed 2 different 11-episode series to build a fandom for the incredible toys.
In the fall, I got to fulfill a sort of childhood dream–I got to make a real-life version of the first level of Sonic The Hedgehog. That’s right, for SEGA and TOMY Toys, I concepted a complete stop-motion recreation of the original Green Hill Zone. I took an action figure of Sonic and built a 37-foot long multi-level paper and fabric set, completely to scale. I scripted, storyboarded, and co-directed the YouTube/Facebook video with an amazing animator, Bearville Alive‘s puppeteer, and a very patient team. The 30-second video killed, getting over 630K views across platforms and drawing overwhelmingly positive fan cred to TOMY.
I also got to level up my Production Design game–between the Sonic project, Bearville Alive! episodes with new licensed partners (including My Little Pony, Trolls, and Shopkins!!), online ads that developed my food styling skills for Lena’s Pizza and POWER3D, and a string of high-end corporate videos for none other than Microsoft, I ended up with a more diverse Design Reel than ever before–check it out!
Beth Ashby 2017 Production Design Reel from Beth Ashby on Vimeo.
Beth Ashby 