Some Fun Time Wasters

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Things are about to get pretty busy here deadline-wise over the next few days. I’m probably going to be working through the weekend. Bummer. In lieu of a regular blog post, here’s a few quick links that I thought were fun:

Non-Digital Photoshop – Something for all you Photoshop users who prefer to do things old-school.

Tons of free cartoons – According to the Drawn! blog, United Features’ website now offers their various comic strips for free. You can even choose your favorites and read the comics directly via RSS. They don’t just send you a link to the comic, they send you the actual strip. Cool! Not sure if this will do much to help save the comic strip from the impending doom of newspapers, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Jelly Telly is now live! – Phil Vischer, creator of VeggieTales, has officially launched his newest venture, JellyTelly.com. It’s sort of like Sunday School meets Sesame Street. Humorous educational vignettes featuring a mixture of puppets, live action, and animation. There’s also some fun online games for the kiddo’s. You can test it out free for a month, after that you pay a small subscription fee to view daily episodes.

There ya go. Enjoy the time wasters. Me, I gotta get back to work.

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Effects and Color Keys

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Most of my work on the 3-2-1 Penguins! TV series was character designs and a few props here and there. However, for one episode I was asked to help out on some last-minute effects work. That episode aired this past weekend on NBC so I am finally able to show the art publicly.

In this episode the penguins and Michelle answer a distress call from a planet inhabited by sock monkeys. Their world has been flooded with grape soda (or grape juice, I can’t remember) and they’ve been living in a city protected by a giant glass dome, sort of like Atlantis. Now the glass is cracking, and like the hole in the proverbial dike it gradually gets bigger and bigger.

Various characters take turns promising to keep their finger in the hole, then abandon their posts. Each Penguins episode has a biblical moral attached (taken from the book of Proverbs), and this week’s lesson was about keeping your word.

Liquids can be extremely difficult to draw, paint, or animate. Unlike most elements of nature, water is constantly moving and changing shape. Also, it doesn’t absorb light and cast shadows the way most things do. Most objects bounce light back into our eyes (causing us to see color), but light passes through water. If the liquid has color (like grape soda) then some of the light passes through and some of the light bounces back. There was a lot of grape soda flowing and spraying in this episode, so a lot of drawings were needed to show the animators just how the liquid should look in each shot.

When you work on a weekly TV series deadlines are extremely tight. It’s like trying to lay down railroad tracks in front of a moving train. On this episode I had even less time than usual so I just drew right over the storyboards, only re-drawing an occasional arm, face, or pose if needed. A couple of color keys were requested to show the overall color scheme of the set, and once those were established no other color was needed except for the grape soda. I did a total of eighteen drawings. Here’s a few of them:

At one point in the story someone attempts to plug the hole with a wadded-up Sunday funnies from the newspaper (illustrated by the prop artist, I just added the bricks and soda). It holds for a while…

…then explodes!

It was really fun to stretch myself and try something different with this assignment. Looking back my only regret is that I didn’t add enough contrast to the soda. I should have added some darker values here and there to give it a little more solidity and depth.

“Stay Tooned!” Issue #2

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A few short weeks ago issue #2 of Stay Tooned! magazine was released. It’s a terrific magazine chock full of articles and interviews by cartoonists for cartoonists. It covers all sorts of cartooning from comics to animation to panel cartoons to character design to editorial cartoons to….well, you name it. Each issue weighs it at a hefty 88 pages, is printed on sturdy paper, and features interviews with some of the heavy hitters in the industry.

Issue #2 features interviews with:

(cover artist) Joe “Scooby Doo” Staton
Mike “Mother Goose and Grimm” Peters
Bill “Commercial Appeal” Day
Tom “Creating Characters” Bancroft
Mason “B.C.” Mastroianni
Ben “Midnight Sun” Towle
Jules “The Village Voice” Feiffer
Berke “Opus” Breathed

plus articles/columns by R.C. Harvey, Tom Richmond, Norm Feuti, Corey Pandolph and Jack Cassady.

(EDIT: For those of you interested in character design, my buddy Tom Bancroft has an article about that very topic in this issue. Since Tom literally wrote the book on the subject, it should be a good read.)

You can order issue #2 or subscribe to the magazine at the Stay Tooned! website.

Tod Carter Interview

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Tod Carter is an uber-talented artist. He’s worn a lot of hats over the years from animator to story artist to director to illustrator. He’s worked on projects for companies such as Disney, DreamWorks, and Big Idea (VeggieTales) as well as several TV commercials. I had the privilege of working under him on 3-2-1 Penguins! (he directed several of the episodes I worked on) and he was always a terrific boss. I’ve also had fun inking Tod’s pencils for a couple of VeggieTales children’s books through Scholastic, such as the one pictured above.

Recently the website Animated Views posted a lengthy interview with Tod. Among other things he talks about what it’s like to work on a Disney “cheapquel”. Fascinating stuff.

While you’re at it, check out Tod’s blog (which I’ve added to my blogroll at left) and the website of his new company, Brain Freeze Entertainment. You’ll be glad you did.

Motion 08 Recap

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Last week I attended the Motion 08 conference in New Mexico. The 4-day event was geared towards two industries: animation (2D and 3D), and motion graphics/editing. It was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in a while. The seminars were loaded with helpful and inspiring information, and I met a ton of great people.

As an animation character designer, I figured this would be a good opportunity to do some networking with lots of potential clients. My goal was to meet as many people as possible and flex my networking muscles. It was a real treat to get out of my isolated studio and hang out with other creatives in the industry. All in all I think I gave out over 100 business cards.

The first day featured several seminars open to the general public and finished off with a screening of animator Phil Nibbelink’s self-produced feature film “Romeo and Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss”, followed by a Q&A session with Nibbelink. I missed the seminars but flew in just in time for the movie. The film is a loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with cartoon seals playing all the major parts. Nibbelink is an experienced Disney animator who wrote, animated, and produced the entire 80-minute film in his basement. Quite an impressive feat!

The next three days were packed with seminars on animation, editing, and motion graphics. At any given time three seminars were going at once. I focused on seminars about animation, so I can only tell you about those sessions. I can only assume the other sessions were just as terrific.

Monday I attended an all-day seminar on the modern television animation pipeline using Flash. The seminar was presented by animator Stanton Cruse from Film Roman. Afterwards I went out for dinner with four guys who design fake computer display graphics for TV and movies. When an actor uses a computer in a movie or TV show, these guys design what shows up on the actor’s computer screen. Most of the time the computer isn’t really doing anything, the actor is just miming to a mini-movie playing on his computer designed to look like real software is running.

Tuesday I attended seminars on animation principles, using Flash, and surviving Hollywood. Fascinating stuff presented by first-class speakers.

Wednesday’s seminar topics included animating to music, designing character packs for Flash, acting in animation, and designing ethnic characters. The last two seminars were both led by Dan Haskett, a veteran Disney animator and character designer. His work was incredible and his wisened, soft-spoken manner had me hanging on every word. More about his presentation in my next post.

If you are serious about animation, be sure to attend Motion 09 next year in Alburquerque, NM. Sign up for future updates.