The Ballad of Seamus O'Leary, 3rd Generation Copy Repair Person

"One dark and stormy night, Seamus gets a call at 3am. 3M corporation called, their copy machine is on the fritz. This thing was as big as a bus... but Seamus battled that copy machine through the night, and he beat that machine, he fixed it... but it being an Irish song, (sniff), Seamus lost his life. So now every time you see a smudge in your copies, that's a little bit of Seamus..." HA! That story kills me every time. Anyways, now that the stage is set...

Originally, I storyboarded this sequence, drawing inspiration from a variety of scenes... Luke Skywalker vs. the Rancor Monster, Val Kilmer slaying the Tir Asleen dragon in "Willow", the lobby scene in "The Matrix"...


But looking at the sequence, Jim thought there was no way we'd have time enough to see the whole thing, since Sweeney tells his story pretty fast. So we changed direction, and decided to have a side-scrolling battle across various points of the copy machine... "Think Super Mario Bros." he said. AWESOME. I can do that:




Well, we went round after round, adding stuff, taking stuff away, making Seamus a lot smaller... here's the final product. Now all that's left is to animate this thing... should be fun.



One of Jim's suggestions was making the middle terminal inset, but when he did, his drawing looked to me like the Death Star trench scene in Star Wars. I asked if that was where the weak spot went, and his reply? "Stay on target... stay on target!" LOL

So as a result, observant fan-boys will pick up on my obscure Star Wars reference I've included in the drawing... ;)