Thingies

Just a drawing.



This was a to a girlpal who tortured me over my love of pigmy marmosets . She would make little flash things of women in marmoset fur swallowing live mamosets coming off a converier belt. Posting recipes for cooking marmosets anything that would upset me . I put up this sketch of furry revenge.



Just a sketch of Betty Davis I did in marker. I hate marker , it takes away your freedom to make mistakes.



A lovely friend of mine went through an operation that didn't go perfectly and so I did her this card.



Oh , this was a character named Buber , I was going to use in Produken , Train of Death. I wanted something Mickey yet not. The film involved a lot of blood and terror.



This is just anotyher throw away design for a commercial that never got used.

Tatts

A girl from my group was trying to design a tattoo for herself so I gave her a hand. It's really rough and it needs to be refined but I liked it.

Furless

Don't adjust your set.

Lol, ok I trust you got through that, back to fricken art =)

Done!

Well here we are in Sherman Oaks. 8 days of deconstructing and reconstructing. I am totally wiped out but it looks really good. New tables couches and chairs on the way.Hope to be posting soon.

We are moving !

Well it seems our Burbank days are over and it is Sherman Oaks for us. For 13 years we have sat here in the worlds worst valley full of pollution, the fires , the soot , the car exhaust. Our apartment building was flipped three or four times which each speculator wanting more in rent because as you see Burbank is not rent controlled and now they want 2000 a month rental for a rat trap. I had dinner with a friend and mentioned it and she told her landlady and we got an apartment in a better building, better location , rent controlled area, right off a park in a really nice community for what we are paying now. Oops! Half our building has moved out and the cost of renovating our apartment here after we leave will destroy any profit for the owners for years to come. Dumb, very dumb. But that is real estate in America today.

This year two million home owners will go bankrupt and have their homes foreclosed on by banks/lenders that tricked them into loans or refinancing they couldn't afford . So now the apartment renters are trying to gut what is left of the American middle class and turn them into indentured slaves for the New World Order living hand to mouth. Capitalism with a capital A (for assholes) .

And all this started because Bush needed to fake the GNP so in league with the Federal Reserve (a conglomeration of banks that run America) they removed credit checks and standards for home purchases. And it worked because construction rates went up and inflated the GNP. Neocons and war mongers pointed to the numbers trying to pretend that out president isn't anything but a sock puppet. End result ? 90 % of the applicants lying about their income and getting homes without the slightest ability to repay them. A market made up of 25% speculators. Massive consumer debt and bankruptcy laws put in place to keep you paying till you are deep in the ground and buried. Who was stupid enough to believe the housing boom would never end or that a 120,000 house is actually worth 600,000 ? LOts of people. Everyone who didn't buy in should feel like a million dollars. And while we are at it how about the loan industry targeting old poor black women for personal loans . How about that for kindness ? For every poor older black lady you see on the news getting help to save their home from bastards who tricked them into poverty there are ten who just gave up and lost everything they had.

Quiet Moments

Sorry I haven't posted much but like you all things are crazy busy . Some more of the early rough developement for MTP.

Also Googles buy out of the blogger team has consolidated it's empire and this blog is on new software. They offer it as a choice then they force you onto it so you have to have a Google account . You then find you have all these messages you didn't know you had because , well you didn't have a Google account. Arrrgggh. Sorry if I missed a bunch but blame mother Google. You will also notice your avatars might be missing because of that.

A little more of it...

..... yeah.

Ok...... with that out of the way ...

...... one of the rough studies for the new project MTP.

Things as they are :)

Well I think this post has served it's purpose so back to just art . Thank you for the (hundred +) emails and all the phone calls. (pretty close to 2000 profile views alone in two weeks , yow ! ) The support has been ovewhelming and I really do love you all.
Thanks everyone.

D

Megan Brain

Ok, shameless plug. One of my favorite sites on the web belongs to the incredible Megan Brain. Her paper sculptures are just amazing. The designs that are the basis for these sculpts are just terrific.

http://meganbrain.com/

Getting ready for launch.

Ok so I have been working for the last year on this project. Hopefully to launch within a month. There are still things in the works so things are changing but I built the bgs all in 3D . Should be fun. We shall see. :)

The Circle

As many of you know , Iwao died. Sad but yet still beautiful in a sense . A happier ending we should all find because as many of you know he was active to the end. I was lucky enough to get to actually work with him on my last job at Warners. You know I was so blown away I forgot to blame him for my career. Name it he did it and he was drawing right there while I talked to him. I'm sure 15 minutes after we met I blended back into the crowd like the millions of my fellow geeks. Still, it was Iwao. He talked a lot about being Milt Kahls lead key . About Milts sarcasm with him and their interesting , almost adversarial relationship. I wish I had written it all down because it was fascinating. It's sort of like seeing the martians and forgetting to turn on your camera. Oh well, he was terrific and though I didn't get to work with him directly after that he still worked on The KarateGuard as did , doing a couple scenes for Tony and Spike.

All this and Joe Barbara dying too. It's been a bad year that way. These people were so nice. Bill Hanna used to talk to me when ever I ran into him in the elevator . He was like that, relaxed and friendly. It never was a disappointment meeting these people because animation people are actually often exactly what they seem (not all , but most).

Now the pic of Scoob is not on model. I doubt any of us ever really got him on model because to be honest , the only person who could draw him right was Iwao. He was both simple and incredibly complex. Incredibly. Luckily we were guided by stock footage from greats like Irv Spence Ray Patterson and Ed Barge. They could move just about anything . This is probably the last time I will ever draw Scoob for a reason and it's fitting to draw him my way. God , it has been since 1980 that I really drew him and this is totally from memory so it joins the honored roll of the thousands of off model Scoobs . How amazing that a character that wasn't even supposed to exist (he was not in the original script) could turn out to be TV's historical champion for longevity. No small tribute to virtually the father of almost every HB character . I think Milt would have been very proud to say he worked with Iwao Takamoto. And that is fitting because who wouldn't.

BLACK TRAIN OF DEATH RETURNS!

Ok, because Matt asked for it I am going to put it up again in two editions. The Maners Edition featuring the original Produken , BLACK TRAIN OF DEATH title and the child friendly happy go lucky BLACK TRAIN OF DEATH clean version.




NEW LINKS

MATT MANER MEMORIAL TRAIN OF DEATH T'S

REGULAR HAPPY GO LUCKY TRAIN OF DEATH T'S

Oh, just so you know this is a close up of the number of the train.







Send me a pic of you in your BLACK TRAIN OF DEATH T (or whining Btatty Bun Shirt and I will feature it here.

Commercial MADNESS!

During your career you do a lot of things. Doing commercials is kind of interesting because while they have brutal deadlines and don't always pay great they do offer you opportunities to try some different techniques and see the effects. Powwow Worldwide ( Dave Smith ) offered me a set of three commercials for an insurance company. The first one was just around a week to in actual animation production , the rest ended up around a week and a half.

The interesting part of it was we had another artist who would go over my drawings an put an ink line to it. So basically I could animate the way I wanted and it would be put through that filter, dropping whatever detail they felt they didn't need . She would straight ahead the ink line so it would be whatever came from that. The first one was fun because I got to do a few set ups. Wendy did a scene as did John Williamson (the car backing up ) .

The second was interesting because it had some weird ideas to it. This pic kind of shows the kind of translation. Oh yeah the jacket lines were dropped and they had me make the online phone guy look more threatening and evil. Anyway the first two went quick and everything got approved. Fast fast jobs.

The last one I have to show because something funny happened. It was going to be the one with the most time and all of a sudden the ad agency decided they wanted to do the board. The concept was .... well odd. It was called "Cover you ASSets". Get it, ASS, cover your ASSets. Uhuh, this was going to be a weird one. On top of that the characters were male and female and they were .... uh .... naked. Oh boy, nudity, and crude humor in one job. How fun !

Ok, so the agency took ten days to come up with the boards (eating a week off our schedule and leaving me just 6 days to animate it. Not horrible but it's 25 seconds. Long shot , cut in, cut out , cut in , cut out, cut in. Honestly, that was like something anybody could have scribbled out in a half hour. Also , the boards weren't in any way reflective of the designs being used . They were the most cartoon proportion and indecipherable movements . Totally confusing. So ok, I do it and I have just days before I start LTBIA . Next I hear they want a scene change , ok so I go in ( like a week later, they were dragging their feet ) and the ad exec gives me this big long spiel on what he wants for this little scene redo. I began to get confused because , well what he was asking for was a lot longer than they had time for. I asked him to act it out and we would time it . But the way he acted it out was 10 seconds or so. I was honest and said "this will gut the center and you will have to lose some other scenes to do it". They weren't happy with that .My problem was that I had no time now and had to start on LTBIA in like 4 days. So we hear nothing, I get paid in full ( Powwow works like that because they are very specific with clients beforehand about what's being done so there are no loop holes). I hear nothing and so off I go to LTBIA and I'm done.

So, like 8 months later it airs, they apparently got someone else to do the revision only, just as I said, they had to lose a couple of the scenes around the middle ( yes , I think that they had a block and tried to make their ideas work by torturing another company, good , as long as it wasn't me ). Not that my animation was great but , this was really pretty stiff. It still didn't do what they wanted . At least they got finished ...... nearly a year later. I feel sorry for who ever they got to do it , I have no doubt they made it a bad time and rode them around like a prize pony. My scenes are at the beginning and end but .... hmmm. It's actually funny but for the wrong reasons. Life huh.

Anyway , just for fun here is the original pencil for "Cover your ASSets". Most likely the strangest concept for a commercial I've ever worked on (oh well there was these two Shreddies torturing a small boy, Michel Gagne was my inbetweener on that one and always reminds me of it) . Oh ignore the contract, that was just rough placement as it was to be CG'ed in later. Hmm.

ASSets

Oh , please notice they have wedding rings on, this makes them being completely naked A-OK !

Happy B day to youuuuu !

Just a character I did for a Callies birthday card =)

Logo

A company logo I just did for my friend Pam's company Roadkill . It doesn't have the rest of the text, address and stuff but I liked the idea. Actually, I had a blood spattered road but, she thought it was a bit much =) . Ok , well yeah I guess stores might question that. I enjoy doing this stuff because we never get to work with color, do we. S'fun.

BRATTY BUN !

Ok, I know I know, a train of death might not be your style so I decided to do a new drawing based on my own character . I had done a ruff for this last december but never got around to doing a final till today. Yeah, I can still draw a little =)

Its a different shop and more for women and kids because I know none of you macho male artists would dare to wear a little pink bunny. Not that you would admit to :=) Back to animation after this .

BRATTY BUNS HERE ! TOTALLY BUNS

http://www.cafepress.com/totallybuns

Bits

More ...... um .... crap. Ok, this is a smattering of random scenes, some were either in my old reel but got dumped long ago or never made it in at all. From low budget to SUPER LOW budget =). I thought it would be good to include a few that were actually here on blog like the Rover/Asterix scenes so the drawings will now actually make a little more sense. Warning, it's 7 and half minutes long and an mp4.

Click the link to see the mov. It is a step down for size so it may not play properly at the right frame rate . Best to just pause it while it loads then get it over with quick. All the scene captures from below are from this one clip.

BITS

Had to reupload. I think it got corrupted . Hmmmmm.




So, Rover, then a bit of tin soldier from Nutcracker. I don't think many people saw that film and while I only was there a few months I both animated and posed (mostly the end sequence where the mouse king attacks Clara, the finals of my Claras were done by the brilliant Chris Sauve, I'll talk about him more later ) . The voice is Peter OToole and the mumbling he is doing is something he said was a typical British military officer standard. I love when actors do that , it's so much better than a perfectly clean voice track. You can hang things on it.



A couple scenes from Rocka Doodle. Yeah I know you haven't seen that but they were there . My last film with Bluth ( I did Land and ll Dogs) and I left early because my mom got sick and I went to Disney right after. Loved working with Pomeroy, such a positive person , as many people discovered working on George awesome person to work with. I think he is on the Simpsons movie now. It was funny watching him act out the Chanticlar dancing , he actually is quite good. He had the Elvis thing down.



Ok, the green flying superhero, Weedman. Lol, oh you are thinking weed as in pot right ? No, real weeds and dandelions. Ok , it was a commercial I did (oh, and it's grease pencil on cell by the way, try that some time if you want to go insane, (this is why I had assistants with beautiful line ) and I thought it was weird so there it is. Obviously I was going through a wipe drawing phase ( known as the 3 drawing blur ) . Really tacky in grease pencil , aggh. Ha, enjoy the little transformer thing at the end. Yes , they were big then and the client ..... wanted .... kid appeal ? Oh god, I have no idea. None. Zip , zilch, nada. Whatever it will be like one of life's great mysteries like UFO's. Commercials are viciously fast and this was no exception. I think it was like the very first one I ever did. Yeah it i really hard to look back , I think I had to do it in week.



A couple scenes from the Grinch promo I did (no sound) . Sorry folks , that is all I could find,I think the original is on U-matic , somewhere. I am pretty sure I coped out on the final scene too and didn't take it far enough but I have no way of telling , live and learn. The premise was about just how long the Grinch could maintain his new found love of humanity with all the awful things that happen to us every day. Oh , what you think this is a terrible idea to do to a classic AGAIN ? Oh Bambi 7 is ok though =) You ain't seen nothin hunny buns. Working commercially is the test of just how much of that you can take. Anyway, I tried to stay as close to the original drawing wise as I could. Ok, the birds suck because they aren't Suess like. It was a test so, you get to do everything wrong there. I think the Grinch translated well for not having been copying the Jones/Karloff thing (though if I'd had a chance I would have loved doing that design, Jones was brilliant ) .




Next one you saw the rotation on the house mom earlier, I did his out of my house for Pascal Blais in Montreal. Roger rabbit was big so it kind of has that Benny the Cab thing going. I'm not including every scene I did just to keep this all small or er ,... smaller.




A little All Dogs, I did a lot of Charlie walking ( read A LOT 0 WALKING ) and while the crowds were roto based (thank god) the doggies weren't. My only secret for animating quadruped is do the front legs first, everything else follows ,mine suck but they got passed so shut up ok. Love the coat scene (I called it the chest bursting Alien scene) , was both painful and fun. You can hurt your brain trying to figue it out threee characters riding each other. Don't belie me ? Go on, try it ! Dan K did the layouts for that section and kept telling me to get Charlies mouth open wider for this one vowel . During the one word he wanted his jaw flat against his chest , I look at it now and I still didn't do it enough. Funny looking back. The horror, the horror.



Some Zack/ Crysta FG scenes. A few Batty scenes , I boarded that rap section with Bill as well.




Hunchback, I only got a chance to do Clopin . Well plus Pheobbie, the horses and all the soldiers, my first official scene after sitting in solitude for 8 month as they reworked the film, a good time to pick up a heroin addiction don't you think ) . Now I wasn't to find out later but James Baxter (who totally LOVES drawing horses) thought that I should do it because he thought I would enjoy it (yeah James , one horse would have been excellent, four with riders , well how much enjoyment can one person have, well then it is Spirit precursor ) . I believe I walked by his room, stuck my head in and mumbled my curse of revenge. Sadly, I loved doing it , it took a while though . Sickening business, isn't it ? And no, thats a fraction of the scenes. The Esmeraldas there too.



Some Pink Panther for Kroyers



A little ELD Miguel (James did the Tulio) .



Osmosis mayor , Shatners voice, yes , before Over the Hedge. Oh and that's my OJ too.



Asterix in America , the reason I included the water sequence we did in our apartment in TO is that before Mr K's "tradigital" statement we had all long since working with cg and 2D combinations ( Bill Kroyer was giving us cg plots back on Ferngully in 91) . I believe this was the first time water had been done like this and it was done for Gerhard Hahn studio's in Germany. Got a lot of press ........ over ... in Europe =) I like the fact they were trying to make the water fit the cartoon and not the reverse. Gerhard is an amazing man. Very forward thinking, was cutting tons of series while we were doing this simultaneously. Oh, and I had one of the other satellite studio's attack me to the company for PAYING MY CREW TOO MUCH MONEY ! I feel guilty over that but , well, I will live. And ... uh .... so will my crew.



I did Obelix, Asterix , the Indian princess (got to do yet another power up from drinking Getafixes exlirs), Getafix , the medicine man and a whole lot of bg characters, boarded and did some series designs while doing that . Animators on it were Chris Sauve , Jamie Oliff , Wendy, Jamie Mason , Morgan Ginsberg , Dave B and myself Chuck even did a scene later . The bear in the Obelix drug sequence is exclusively Chris Sauve except for one scene Jamie O did where he is rounding the corner ( boarded that entire seq as I remember ). Now that is a bit of a strange one as it did not exist in the books, not for more than a panel or two. I just thought it would be funny to have the bear land on Ob's shoulders.




The Indian village being destroyed was John Williamson . Oh yeah the second scene (of the Buffalo) hallucination is the amazing Mark Koetsier. Probably one of the most under rated animators ever he is boarding at DWs. Beautiful timing. Oh speaking of, must include his website for Jet Pack Benny . http://www.jetpackbenny.com



Ok, last but not least , the football game, my first Asterix. Sadly the animation director at the time wanted it more economic so he just pulled out every other drawing whenever he found ones. I mean you are doing an action sequence right, two's are for losers I say =) Screw them !




So that is it for the moment. Please no one rip out your eyes , it's not my fault. You were warned beatch !

Oh and if you click the tinybun.com sign at the top it will take you to some LTBI stuff. Like you want to after this.

Arrow Clip

Ok, I have a really small flash clip of some of what I did for Arrow. It's in B&W and no sound because the colors are so burned out that it is hard to see and the size is better that way . Should give you an idea though. Zombies , voodoo and black magic. Tony Fucile, Doug Frankel, Bruce Smith,Dan Jeup, Anne Marie Bardwell . Krystal , Wendy and Steve Markowski all did sections. This is just a clip of mine .

ARROW CLIP

Oh I should mention RALPH EGGLESTON did a scene as well. He art directed it with Sue too I think as well. Whatever, he will correct me. =) Ouch.