MMC: What gave you the idea of creating your own Minimate?
Tim: I guess it goes back to the Art Asylum Collectors Club and I thought it would be cool if Art Asylum did a club only Minimate. Obviously the the club going belly-up means that never happened. Skip forward to just after Christmas and a bunch of the guys from the AA forums were online and were talking about exclusives and that it'd be nice get one of 'our' own. Well I guess the idea never really went away and eventually I thought "What have I got to lose by seeing if it's possible?"
MMC: Did you always have the logo in mind?
Tim: I had no idea what I wanted to start but needed to be something simple and bold that worked in black and white, So looked around the Art Asylum site for something cool but not too obvious, as soon as I saw the Bomb logo and knew it just seemed to make sense. If I'd have had a larger scale to work with I would probably have gone with the 'Da Vinci's Minimate' thing...
MMC: How did you convince Adam from Art Asylum to help with your project?
Tim: I actually thought it'd be easiest to get hold of Diamond Select Toys to see if they could supply me with Free Comic Book Day Minimates but unless you're a distributor they are pretty tricky to get hold of and I almost gave up. I took a guess at Adam's email address and sent him an email asking if he'd supply me with FCBD Minimates for a project I was working on. Adam's such a great guy to even respond to my first email, he was probably thinking 'nutter or scammer'. He asked what my plans for them for were, so after a few emails back and forth he said if they were for the guys on the forum then no problems he'd put a bunch aside and to remind him nearer the release time.
Two months later I sent him a reminder and he was like 'what.... oh yeah remind me about this again'. So I sent a pic of my prototype Minimate and he liked it. My gut feeling is that image swung it and saved the whole project. We also talked about getting them 'Tampo printed' like a genuine Minimate but in the end the cash involved and quantities worked against us, so we decided to go the cheaper but more labour intensive route of me applying decals. Adam also decided that at this point he might be able to dig up blanks rather than FCBD Minimates. A couple of weeks later I had a 100 blank white Minimates and a pretty huge task on my hands.
MMC: Are you pleased with the final results?
Tim: For the most part yes... but then again I'm a perfectionist and hate the fact that doing 100 meant I couldn't make them all 100% perfect or I'd probably still be doing them. I really like the way the packaging came out, it turned out better than I'd hoped.
MMC: Is there anything you would have done differently?
Tim: Yeah I wouldn't have started...*winks* I guess the big thing would have been to get tampo prints but it was just too costly and the minimum numbers were way too huge for the limited run I wanted to do.
MMC: What next for Timbo?
Tim: Well a rest from mass production! *laughs* I think I've also been very much all over the board with this project so I'm planning on keeping a lower profile for a while. As for Minimates? Well I have a bunch of custom ideas that have been floating around my head for a while, a few Marvel and DC, some Classic Battlestar Galactica and oh course a few more 'interpretations' of Gra007's Star Wars designs. or whatever takes my fancy... Oh and next year... I have ideas but...we'll see ;)
