The great and powerful Ryan Ottley was nice enough to send over some pictures of his time on the set of Paul. For those not familiar with Ryan, he draws for the Image title Invincible. As well as some other fun projects, such as Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark. Follow him on Twitter and make sure to check out his personal site, but not before reading about his adventure below!

I got a call from Robert one day in 2009, he asked if I wanted to be on the movie set of Pegg and Frost’s new film. I was a bit perplexed by this at first, didn’t understand WHY anyone would want us in their movie. He explained more and told me that they were huge fans of our comics and all we had to do was pretend we were at Comicon, I quickly agreed. So Robert sent them a box of comics and shirts to use in the film and we went to New Mexico. We were on set for two days, ALL day. 6am to 11pm. These guys work some seriously crazy hours. I took cell phone photos throughout, not the best photos but it’s all I got.

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We walk into the Albuquerque convention center and there it is, the best “fake” Comicon I’ve ever seen! It felt like a real con was going to happen here! Robert, Cory, Joe Keatinge, and Andy Kuhn and I walked around looking at the booths, no extras are there yet, just us and the crew setting up for shots. A fellow named Clint Trucks was our generous host and instantly our friend. He’s the one that set up this whole Comicon scene, he introduced us to the directors and other actors. We find the Image booth set up, 12 gauge booth was brought there by Doug Wagner, Oni, Slave Labor, and many other comic companies brought their booths out to be a part of this. Clint showed us our “fake” booth with large signs with our names on them and we hung out for a bit, felt right at home! The 400 extras showed up and the filming started. It lasted all day, I drew the whole time and while it was interesting to see how this stuff is made and see familiar faces of actors, it’s actually very tedious and a bit boring, at the same time very eye opening to how much man-power it takes and how time-consuming movie making really is. And I was thankful for the job I have, comics for the win. When we had to pretend to be at Comicon it was actually harder than I thought. Had to act normal but NOT talk. Just mouth words to the extras at our booth. It obviously felt unnatural but I did my best without bursting out laughing at the weirdness of the situation. Unfortunately lots of this scene was cut and hopefully the DVD extras show all of this stuff.

This was when they asked us to come into a panel room and we had to pretend George Lucas was coming on stage and we cheered and followed direction. I got this photo of Robert sitting by a fake Picard. They didn’t want us sitting together, we looked to “grouped” so they spread us all out to look more natural I guess.

Cory and Robert Spooning. Not for reals though, they were both very awake. They were just “acting” asleep for the sake of the photo, very believable stuff here folks.

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Plenty of Princess Leia’s on hand, Simon sat amongst them for a photo shoot. Cracking everyone up, him and Nick Frost were constantly happy and in a great mood making everyone laugh the whole time. At one point Nick came over to talk to us and geek with us a bit about comics. He’s a fan of Invincible and so Cory and I gave him a folder with some original art because we are huge fans of his. He flipped out, said some crude hilarious things that had to do with his excitement getting the pages. One thing I remember was he did say he was going to frame them, so the glass would make for easy clean-up when he was done. I felt bad that we didn’t bring anything for Pegg but he didn’t read our book! Simon Pegg is a Walking Dead fan and there was no Walking dead artists present! Sorry Simon! I should have at least drew him a zombie.

Watching them do scenes and then replay them through the tv’s here and then eventually do a re-shoot. Very cool to watch.

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Really awesome to see Kristen Wiig dress up as our Invincible character Atom Eve. Robert, Cory, and I asked if we could take photos so they happily obliged. This scene never made it into the theatrical release, wait for the DVD! But hey, still cool to see. At lunch, before this scene, we sat with the crew, Simon Pegg came over and talked with us for a bit, chatting to Robert about the Walking Dead. Simon then said “Well I better run, I need to do a Kissing scene with Atom Eve!” He then pointed at Robert, Cory, and I, and said “I’m living out all of YOUR fantasies.”

Good times.

Ryan