Laugh it up! It's Halloween!

Just a little something so I could have a Halloween-day post. Play it safe kids!

Happy Holloween!

KATAMARI

I'm playing this game called "We Love Katamari". It's actually a sequel to a game called "Katamari Damacy". If you own a playstation 2 and like quirky games, you probably heard about it. It's a fun, fun game - and it inspired me to try a cute little painting that expresses the joy. This little guy (The Prince) is rolling a Katamari, a sticky ball that picks up just about anything in it's path. The game itself has story art in it that is just incredible - the game is worth it for that alone.

Have a great Friday everybody!

Reindeer Interior - BG and boards


Here is the background for the next shot. I'll start the scene out fairly dark, and then lighten it up as Santa busts through the doors. There are 2 backgrounds - the first one is absent of blue light and will probably be darkened in the composition. I will matte in the blue light forming as the doors open. The BG is pretty simple - the reindeers will take up most of the space so no need to distract with extra details.

FROG THERAPIST

So, folks have been asking to see animation from "Alien for Christmas". I'd love to put it out there - but I'm not quite ready to stick it on the internet just yet. I feel like it would be a little pre-mature since it will still take some time to complete. I'll think about it. Maybe something in the future.

Until then, here is a little animation I did for the 10 second club in August, 2003. This was a fun piece to do - the dialogue was great, and this is a good representation of my Flash animation. This one pushes some extreme mouth shapes on the male frog - and there was plenty of opportunity to hit a lot of poses quickly. I hope you like it if you haven't seen it already.

Special thanks to John Griffin for the web space.

DOOM MONDAY

I saw the Doom movie this weekend. Was it everything you wanted it to be? Yeah - me neither. I really wanted to see more of the "classic" monsters in the film. All I can say is if you have to do a hokey "haunted house" first person sequence, then this is the one to do it in. Missing those Doom 1 demons made me draw this classic Cacodemon today. Look at his smile. He was always happy to take a chainsaw to the eye.

I also have this Cacodemon sculpture - done back in '96 or '97. He was done in original Sculpy. One of his horn tips cracked off, but he's held up OK otherwise.

Santa's Reaction - Animation

I finished this animation today - which completes the "Santa's Interior" section. I'm always happy when a little section gets squared away. This is the first complete bit I've done since starting the blog - 3 shots total. Let me know if there is anything else about the film process you'd like me to share - it's good for me to know what people think! Thanks!

Santa's Reaction - Storyboard

I've been working on the animation

for this shot for the last few days.

I'll let the boards do the talkin'.

CATCH!

It's all fun and games until someone gets acid in the face.

Tuna Sammich

This is a storyboard panel from a cartoon I created with artist Phil Gullett. The character is Tuna Sammich, an innocent, simple minded sandwich that creates a flurry of activity around him as he goes about his business. This panel was drawn by me sometime between '95 and '97 - I'm guessing. The cartoon was finished in 2000 and is still the property of Startoons animation, but the spirit of this little bugger lives on with me.

The Letter - Complete

So here's is the finished shot from yesterday - this is a finished still from the animation. If there is anything I learned from doing Warner Bros. layouts, it's RE-USE! RE-USE! RE-USE! The previous Background, shifted just so and slightly modified, saved me from having to do a completely new one. This shot could have gone faster, but I did the friends and family thing over the majority of the weekend. Trying to always find that balance. Speaking of which, I spent the whole evening playing ESPN NHL 2K5 with my bro. tonight. That gives me just these precious wee hours to set up the next shot. I can't complain - it sure was a hoot!

Little Boy Writing Letter

Here is the final shot of the little boy writing his letter to Santa. Figured I'd post it since I just mentioned it in the previous post. Here we see him writing to Santa, but it isn't revealed that he's asking for an Alien. It's revealed more dramatically in the next scene as the Boy dreams of his ideal Christmas morning. This shot was completed October 22, 2003.

The Little Boy's Letter

The next shot is OTS Santa looking at the little boy's letter. This is where we see the letter in it's completion with a drawing of the Alien. In a previous shot, the letter is established with only the text, and we cut away before he completes it.


This is the storyboard - which serves as a direct layout for the shot.

Return of the Great Gazoo

I love this guy. I'm a big Flintstones fan in general. I always wanted to do my own take on them, and here is one of those images - drawn and rendered around 2000 or so. My friend Kurt Kanellos is one of the best voice actors and can mimic all the Flintstones characters extremely well - he'll have me laughing until I cry. In our take on the Flintstones, Gazoo is more of a slave to Fred, who is forced to carry out his every whim to earn the opportunity to return to his home planet. Gazoo completely despises Fred, and even though he can do anything magically, Fred forces him to do horrible things "by hand". Maybe one day when I retire, I'll get to do my Flintstones homage.

SANTA vs. HULK!!!

All it takes is some funny words and a drawing is born. Thanks for the idea Darryl! Sorry to say, I don't think that Santa, with all of his magical powers from the mighty North Pole of Earth could defeat the Hulk. I would agree that Santa is a super guy, but as you can see - his throat is crushed in one swift stroke. You know what that means don't you? Yes. The Hulk now has to take over Christmas. As the rules state, whoever kills Santa must take his place. I think Tim Allen had to do the same thing in some movie.

Animation Stills - Inside Santa's House

These are a couple still shots from the finished animation. Came out nicely - the shot has a good flow to it. I'm usually not too satisfied when a shot is completed, I play around with it for a while and have to let it grow on me. This one is an exception. The letters coming out of the bag direct the viewer like I was hoping for. Also, I finished a little sooner than I planned - which just means on to the next one! Maybe I'll do a little something different before jumping in...

New Shot - Inside Santa's House

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I finished a shot today, I'm pretty satisfied with the results. Here's how the background turned out.

Long Live the Kitchen Sink Gang

I get asked about this one a lot. This Is a still from a short I worked on back at "Startoons" animation. It was a promotional piece for a cartoon idea - 3 guys living together who were criminals that had to commit crimes to pay the rent. Kitchen Sink Gang consisted of Englishman, Clown, and Spaceman. The kind of show that just deals with their inflexible personalities - similar in concept of ATHF - but done a little before that was on the air. The style pushed a Flash-esque style before there was Flash, and it would be a shame to see this go forgotten. About 2 minutes of animation exist that give a brief glimpse at these wonderful characters. Spawned from a sketch by artist Phil Gullett, these guys were to appear as background characters in a cartoon we were working on before that, but ended up with their own short because of how strong the idea of this combo really was. Will anything ever become of this idea? Hard to tell, but I'm happy to hear about it from time to time by folks that have seen it on some demo tape floating out there.

In this shot, the little boy looks into a toy store window. This scene was completed March 4, 2004 - Has it been that long already?!?

Animation of the elf continues today. Just finished the letters falling out of the bag I described yesterday. The next step is building and animating Santa. This will be the first scene with Santa in it, and I'll be using him for the rest of the short. I'm hoping to finish the santa interior scene by the end of the week.

So here's where I'm at today. Just a little teaser image - which doesn't make much sense as is - I got to the point in the animation where the surly Elf dumps a bag of children's letters to Santa on the table. So far, it's going pretty well, but the next step is to animate a huge amount of letters pouring out of the sack. I'm hoping the simple action of the elf works with what comes next. The elf stops in place and the letters flowing out of the bag will direct your attention to Santa, who then reacts to the action. The shot is really just a chain of actions that direct your attention and progress the story. I'll show more in full when more is complete.

Here is the storyboard for the shot I'm currently working on - The inside of Santa's house.

Here are some ruff drawings from the old days. That's one thing I miss before all this digital work - we did nothing but draw with pencils. I'd have heaps and heaps of drawings back then, and now I have just a spattering. This is Hollister - a character from one of the best shows I had the chance to work on. The show was called "Little Dogs on the Prairie" and it was basically a town of prairie dogs that were well meaning, but treated each other like crap for their own gain. The writing was brilliant on this series. Not all the animation was though.

Character Bio - The Alien
This site may be kind of cryptic. If you don't know me, you don't know anything about this little film project. That's good because I can keep posting little tidbits of info and maybe you'll keep coming back for more!
Here is the Alien from my film. The characters have no names - I just call them what they are - it keeps things simple. I originally drew the ruff board characters as stick figures, and when it came to doing the final character design, extra details just complicated the innocence. The final design seemed to demand that there were just eyes and mouths. Keep visiting for future ruff designs that didn't make it.

For no good reason, it's monkey day today! Here is a still from a test animation I did a few years ago. It was one of my first Flash animation tests where I tried a more untraditional approach, and let all the cutouts do the job. I really liked the results, and that helped build my confidence in the power of Flash as a tool of the future. Really all the credit should go to my good pal - Bob Rissetto - for opening my eyes to it for the first time. I also did a nice little jungle background for this - I like the loose feel that contrasts the sharp character color shapes.

The sequence I'm working on now is about 6 shots long. This is good timing because I can keep updating as I work on a complete scene. This is the establishing shot outside of "Santa's House", minus the snow. This was completed September 25 2005. Not much goes on here - just a slow truck-in as we dissolve in from the last scene and the music sets us up for the next shot. I wish this shot had a few more of the "graphic elements" I've been putting into the other backgrounds, but it just didn't end up that way. It seems to be a pattern in all the exterior shots - not intentional. I naturally work pretty tight and anything loose is deliberately planned. I may go back and make an adjustment, but I'm just trying to move on for now.

I think this guy is related to JJ.

I'm guessing it's past his bedtime.

Here's a little bit to get started. I began with a rough storyboard (top left) - edited to the music track. I kept it all bare bones. No commitments. I played around a while and quickly put everything together. Soon after, I developed a more "Proof of Concept" version (top right) of the storyboard. This was mainly so I could sell the band on the idea and noodle around with a little more detail. At this point, the story was set - and these boards provided much of the layouts for the final. This way I could still work small and not get caught up in those pesky details. The bottom image is a capture of the final shot. Every scene is a color exploration for me. My background is TV animation. I used to do a ton of line only "Warner Bros." style stuff, so this film is also a first for much of my color work.

So... Where to start. Ideally, it would have been nice to start a blog at the beginning of my film project - but now I'm 3 years too late. So maybe we'll just play catch up.

I made a film in College. I made some cartoons professionally. But I never felt like I had a good idea that I could take from start to finish and be proud of. A little song I heard gave me some visual ideas, and before I knew it, I had the elements for something I cared about. This process has taught me quite a bit. I needed to learn a few programs, and once again put aside free time to maybe get a complete idea turned into a film. It's called "Alien for Christmas", and I hope you enjoy the insight I'll attempt to document.

These are my Pups - Pooh Bear and Piglet. Here, Piglet is asleep and Pooh Bear is dealing with being an older sister. This pic was taken shortly after her arrival from LA, where my wife Heather picked her up. They are very cute, as you can plainly see.