VIGNALI STUDIO

I just did an interview with I'm not bad on a project I did TWENTY YEARS AGO -- and what seems like another lifetime ago.

In 1989 I was hired at Disney Imagineering, and a year later became the lead designer for the Roger Rabbit Car-Toon Spin Ride. (Yes, at one point in my career I was a theme park designer.) The interview covers my work on the ride, and how the Toontown project started.

The photo is of me the year the ride opened up to the public in 1994. Interesting to note, the ride was completed a few months after Toontown opened in 1993, but Disney marketing wanted to sit on the ride and open it up in 1994. It literally just sat there under lock and key. But, since I was a friend of Roger, I was able to get my picture with him. That's me on the left, sporting the Walt Disney 'stache.

Another Image from the Trailer...

Here's an image of Big Ben that was featured in the trailer for Hotel Transylvania.

In this sequence, monsters from all over the world are coming to the hotel. So, we needed to create images from various well-known international locations.

What's also exciting is that our director, Genndy Tartakovsky, made a trip last weekend to Cancun, Mexico, to present 17 minutes of footage to the international press. The more stuff continues to come out about our movie, the more I can show you all a bit more.

Hotel Transylvania Trailer!

Sony Pictures Animation is finally coming out with the long awaited Hotel Transylvania, and the first trailer has finally been posted! You can check it out at Hotel Transylvania Trailer.

I've been working on Hotel Transylvania throughout it's various iterations, a total of six years -- by far the longest I've ever worked on any one project. As the Production Designer for Hotel Transylvania, I'm really grateful to Sony Corporate for seeing the potential I saw in this project and didn't give up on it. It would have been very easy for the studio to simply say, "no, this is taking too long,"and simply pulled the plug. However, it took courage to get behind this film and complete it. And for that, I couldn't be more thankful.

I'm really looking forward to showing all the work I've done on this project throughout these past six years. But of course that will have to wait till after the film is released in September.

This particular image is posted on the trailer, and so I thought I would post the artwork that inspired the windmill image in the trailer.