You are never far.

I thought I would stick these early roughs up. For the Family Guy Road to the Multiverse we threw in ideas even before we got the job. I took it as being more Sleeping Beauty but the director Greg really wanted to keep the cartoon proportion. My first pass at Brian with Tony Pulham's color and BG. A more Fox and the Hound version of Brian then I started messing with a Baby Weems version of Stewie ( in the same run for "Look how gayly we run "). A Briar Rose Lois with a Prince Phillip Peter. The big Stewie was a month before we got the final design but other than his larger final head proportion is almost exactly what we used.

A wonderful day for pie !

As some of you might know this was the project a finished a couple months back. It was the Disney sequence for Seth MAcFarlanes Family Guy. Multiple characters, low budget and limited time but that was offset by having a good company as my liaison ( Mainstreet Pictures ) and a terrific art director Tony Pulham. Because of cost the cleanup was sent overseas so while not perfect most survived. Not bad considering this is not the kind of work they do.

Nap time !

In honor of the end of our 3 month project I decided to make a clock , something that reflected my exhaustion.

I did this nerdgirl for my nerd group.

Girls of Different Sizes

A rough sketch I did one morning in TO . It was so cold ! I will tie it down more.

Doodlin

A World Without Hero's

One of my favorite comics when I was young was the Green Arrow / Green Lantern "Snowbirds Don't Fly " set that Neal Adams did with Dennis O'Neil in 1971. DC comics did the impossible, they matched real issues with superhero's.

I loved it because , I mean how many times can you have these characters fight the same formula villains . It was a huge milestone to me and one of the few comics that felt honest. I wish these guys would do it again so ....





Quentin Tarantino said in Kill Bill that Superman was our modern mythology . That Superman uses Clark Kent as a critique of humanity and that Kent is a dope because Superman sees us as weak and cowardly. So to me Superman is the American ideal , our Jesus in a way . "Truth , Justice and the American way ". There is such a contrast in our "mythology ideals " and our actions. I did a rough a couple days back because I wondered if Superman was real how angry he would be over what we have done.


"T'WAS BEAUTY KILLED THE BEAST "

Remember when Eisner refused to leave Disney and Roy had to take him down like King Kong ? Yeah thats the Disney Animation building.



Some sketches for a graphic novel song sequence I was doing. It probably wont make sense without the words .



Some quick costume scribbles .




Ok, many of you have seen Jamie Hewlett's incredible version of the Monkey King. He is producing a stage play and has done an incredible Gorillaz style animated trailer. Well hard to believe but in 2003 Dave Smith came up with doing the Monkey King himself and asked for some character sketches. While nowhere as good as Jamies these were my first shot.



My version of Rupert Murdoch , puppet master ! Media dictator Rupert hires insane attack dogs like the Michelle Malkin to run propaganda sites like Hot Air Dot Com . This peice only makes sense if you have seen hotairs own graphic .


1979 ? And here we are at the beginning of my career ( well pre-career ) . My first color film done on acetate with a grease pencil. The bg is a color card.

Stone Age 3D

Before it became the "soup de jour" I had planned a film in 3D . I had figured that I could do it by matting and layering 3D elements in After Effects ( I think it was like version 2 or 3 ) I modeled in precambrian Hash for Mac and imported the DFX files into a program called Specular3D (a freebee to do logo animation as I remember) . I got some really terrific effects and it actually could do some simple animations layered in. I lost some really wonderful tests in a drive crash ( ah the days of Seagate and their ultra expensive and deliciously unreliable 10,000 rpm drives ) . All lost like teardrops in the rain ....... except ..... I found one jpeg extracted from the original mov . This ship is tumbling away from this Super Nova of a explosion after some ridiculous and goofy thing happens in their lab, I really don't remember the story but I'm sure it was melodramatic and overblown. I'm like that. To ghosts of the past that can never live again.

Mr Dippity

Years ago when we first got here, in the few moments Wendy and I had between jobs , we put together a one minute short. She boarded and laid it out with some minor input from me , I cut the reel together , came up with the color models and bg styling . Wendy animated half of it in her off hours waiting for me to get to design and animate the male character but I got so busy I never got back to it . It's a nonsense film with no deep message or hidden meaning beyond the mystery of man confused by woman. I found the reel again and thought it was just as charming as it was when we first did it so I really should finish it so here I go. It won't be in the "new hip " style but it will be fun. I just finished some CG animation for it and I'm doing his character layouts. The it will be like a week or 2 animating . The ruff design I finally finished.

Passing

It's out there now. Andy Knight died in Paris. It's still hard to believe and I'm still trying to grasp it . Though I worked on a lot of his stuff I cannot say I knew him well. He was this super talented mystery really and I regret that . I had an apology to make I think and , I never really got to say it. Most of our working together was on long distance projects, Asterix or commercials and that is hard because you are under such terrific pressure . Even so I think he was one of the best , if not the best board artist I have ever known and I know he was just a terrific person . He did many things , directed , designed , storyboards , layout , produced and owned his amazing company Red Rover with his beautiful wife and partner Linzi . His talent was not lost with his incredible diversity , he was good at it all . Our sympathies, Wendy's and mine , to his family and his real friends .

A wonderful tribute to Andy is here at Amid And Jerry's terrific Cartoon Brew

Cartoon Brews Andy Knight Article

Fund memories follow by so many people I know like Claude Chiasson ,Robin Budd , Pascal Blais , Ian Hastings , Jamie Oliff , Greg Tiernan ,Paul Bolger , Dino Athanassiou and Kaj Pindal. And of course super animator Ken Duncan's blog on Andy , his co-worker (Asterix in Britain) .

Ken Duncans Blog about Andy

Scribblies

A rough , just messing around in PS after talking with friends about female superhero's.

Entertain me !

The great thing about blogging is it forces you to look at your work again. Something it's hard to do in the work a day world of animation. Some of it works , some of it doesn't but it's just nice to see what you were thinking at a given time in your life. Most of these are recent or within the last year or two. Sorry ,I'm a bit burned out on scanning.

Trust me Mr Soxs ....



Space Rangers. Done before my cintiq it was just a scribble based on some stereotypical Flash Gordon idea.

"Now hand over the X Beam ranger or your life is over".




Cell.


Ahhh , more cow. Ok this is a bit hard to understand as it was rough comic for a freind who loves cows. Trying to get cows some respect. Very loose scribbles.



Swim . Just some early PS playing with simple reflections and color.



My first CG bg test attempts . The program has a very simple light systems so I tried to keep everything as flat as possible to match the drawings I was going to use. The type was done in Elephont .




Another CG bg . This was playing with the morphing tools to create beaches and such. I was going to go in later and do a huge projected set of toners for the sand so this is just a crappy repeated texture for now.




A test sketch for a company logo.





A singer design for another project.

Buns , what else ?!

Bones from the yard.

Hi everybody ! Hope everything is ok . This is just more junk from the archives. The pic below is a test from a project with a friend , Christine Beatty . The design of the girl is actually one I had done for another project as a secondary character that I really liked and thought would maker a good main character. The story is about a cat who is in love with a human.



Occasionally you meet other beginning artists who are struggling with design work. One was trying to do a Batman design so I roughed this out for them.



One of the girls on my web group just loves cows. She was a away for a while but missed everyone so I did this cartoon for her.



Someone gave me this card for a "gentlemen's " club. The art on the card was really primitive ( and one part was exaggerated beyond all reasonable human ability for a woman's back to support something that heavy , guys ) . I told the person it was not really anatomical but I thought the basic pose was interesting so I did my own version of it.




A love Anarchy graphic I designed for another project.



Long before Pixars Cars I had my own version of an anthropomorphic car film ,




A female rock singer design.





A car scribble.



A drawing of the two prop girls on LTBIA . Strangley both named Lisa.




I used this for an icon for a while.




A melodramatic appeal to the moderator Roxanne on my women's group.

Horton Hears a Who !

And flying monkeys too !


As some of you may know I did the Anime sequence (yes, now infamous as you either love it or hate it ) in Horton Hears A Who . Ricardo Curtis , owner of HOUSE OF COOL gave me a shout and asked me if I was interested in doing a sequence for Horton . Hmmm, work for Ricardo, one of my favorite people on the planet ? Gee , I just don't know ????? Of course silly ! And it was a lot of fun :) All the key clean up on the Anime sequence were done by the most talented and elegant woman I have ever known , Lieve Miesson . The mystical Michel Gagne did the main FX with Joey Mildenburger . Oh how I suffer !

Now just to add this , what I liked about the doing sequence was the cutting and anime stereotypes (the boards are what you see ). I'll make no stance to defend it within the Dr Suess context as I loved doing it and though I haven't seen the final it was a bold move by Blue Sky to do something unusual. The movie is doing really well and I am just delighted for them . Upon first seeing the lieca reel (b&w) that contained just a bit of the Horton 3D I was really impressed how beautifully Horton moved. Facially and physically. Quadrupeds are a bitch and they made it seem effortless. I couldn't put anything up till now because of non disclosure. The link below is for one of the flying monkey tests but until I see it I wont know what ended up in the film. Thangs change that way in film .

FLYING MONKEY CLIP

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.