Cool beans!

Alumnus sets sights on completing feature-length computer-generated movie

Patrick Walsh Jr. has performed plenty of Hollywood movie stunts with credits from The Patriot, Diehard: With a Vengeance, The Day After Tomorrow, and most recently acted in I Heart Huckabees with Dustin Hoffman and Invincible with Mark Wahlberg.

But he dreams of pulling off what could be the biggest stunt of his career-producing and directing a computer-generated movie that will rival the quality and appeal of Shrek, Finding Nemo, and other such animated blockbusters. His movie, The Cool Beans(tm) Humbucket Caper, is in production with a planned release for summer 2006.

"I always wanted to write computer games, but there weren't many opportunities to pursue that when I was in college," said Walsh, a New Jersey native who played soccer at USC from 1984 until his graduation with a degree in finance in 1988.
Walsh played professional soccer for a year, worked for a Wall Street bond trading firm, then-following his real passion-set up the beginnings of an animation studio in his Manhattan apartment. That fledgling effort became Walsh Family Media, which is now feverishly working on The Cool Beans project.

Just what are Cool Beans? Imagine a hip band of Lilliputian-sized characters resembling lima beans who astound everyone in the city garden where they live with their amazing musical ability. A rival group, the Bad Seedz, steals the Cool Beans' magical Humbucket-sort of a hybridized saxophone/guitar-and the celluloid plot thickens. Hard to picture all that? Well, the initial idea for the large green ogre and his wise-cracking donkey probably raised a few eyebrows, too!

Walsh is joined on the project by fellow Carolina alumni Paul Bernard, '90, another of the movie's producers, and Matt Madden, '89, vice president of production and development at Atlanta-based Giant Studios, which is assisting with the motion-capture technique that turns two-dimensional images into eye-popping 3-D animated characters. Giant did most of the animation for The Lord of the Rings, for which it won an Oscar for technical achievement, and the body animation for Polar Express.

Walsh is also realizing his early dream of creating a computer game. Along with three educational books featuring the Cool Beans characters, Walsh has concepted a computer game called Rhythm Chase, which combines music, strategy, and action en route to piecing together a two-minute song. A film, three books, and a computer game? Cool beans!