| My name is David McAdoo and I was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1970. Of course, being a child of the '70's, I was raised on Star Wars and Superman. Comics and movies ruled my thoughts growing up. I've lived every day of my life with some sort of idea, dream, fantasy, or memory that involved in some fashion the art of film or story-telling pictures. Growing up in the '70's, I also got completely lost in the amazing art of Frank Frazetta. I think I was about ten when my father bought me the full set (there were only four at the time) of his books. They were actually for my older brother, too, and we sat and redrew those unbelievable paintings all day long. I studied every line and brush stroke of every sketch and painting. I also studied every line of anything I could find by Neil Adams and John Buscema. They were all gods to me. So around that same time, when I was ten, my mother sent me to a week-long seminar by author/illustrator David Melton called "Written and Illustrated by...". This seminar was focused on teaching children from 7 to 18 how to write, illustrate and put together a book about whatever they wanted it to be about and however they wanted to illustrate it. It was a book for children by children. Mine was, of course, about dragons and swordsmen; it was called "The Dragon of Ord." It was a simple book set in the distant future involving a barbarian type, an evil overlord, tons of gold, lasers, spaceships, peasants, kings and an unusually utilitarian dragon. Hey, I was ten. Anyway, as the story goes, a few years later, when I was 15 or so, David Melton decided to start publishing some of these books and distributing them to schools. Mine was the second one chosen. After a few years of touring and speaking at schools and libraries I was a little burnt out with the fine art aspect of my young career so I decided to focus the rest of my high school years and as much of my college as I could on film, my other fascination. Of course, the only way I could figure on getting in was through my art, so I started story boarding. I quickly found that getting films made in the mid-west was a little frustrating so I headed to LA in 1997. I quickly got some small story boarding jobs that had even smaller pay attached and the occasional big paying but still small-time jobs. I've even written a few scripts that I'm trying to get produced. But, story boarding has been a big part of my work out here and I enjoy doing it, but I didn't move 2000 miles from my family to do story boards. There were a few years where I really tried breaking into comics and even self-published my own comic called The Last Soldier of 10-Sky. You can see a sample of that project here on my site. But I didn't move out here to be a comic book artist either, and after years of not finding the right contacts in the film industry I decided the only way to get noticed is to do it myself. For the last few years I've been writing and animating my own feature-length film. It's called Red Moon and I've made a rough trailer for it. Check it out. |
