The Mystery Work in Progress is still in progress and still a mystery. It’s going very slowly, but I like it a lot so far. I’m currently making animatics, while simultaneously trying to nail down the exact look. I’ve been working on and off on this project, at night, in my basement, for about 2 years now, with huge breaks for other work and life-living. It’s hard to keep the momentum sometimes. But I have the music nearly done, and listening to that over and over helps put me in the mood.

In the mean time I’ve scanned in lots of random pages from sketchbooks that I’m going to post here regularly, just for the hell of it. Some of these are more than 5 years old, but they’re just laying around, so…

Here is Random Sketchbook Assortment #1:

This is pretty old. I think the dinosaur was drawn when a corporation I know made a really stupid decision regarding the employment of a person I know. The person is doing just fine now. The corporation may be going extinct.

These were sketches for halloween masks(?) I think I also made Shrinky Dinks out of them.

The hands in this sketch are for another short I’ve been wanting to do. Maybe in a couple years…

Here are some sketches and storyboards for an insurance ad or something. I ripped parts of the stage from these drawings and put them in the Robot Family Christmas thing.

In honor of the holidays, here’s teenage robot Penny Clark from Robot Family soiling and corrupting one of the sweetest moments in the history of televesion animation: Linus’ recital of the Christmas story in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.

Click here to watch!

Have a great holiday, everyone!

A couple years ago, I was at the office supply store when these Avery Matte White High Visibility Labels caught my eye:

You can imagine a pale, skinny, Edward Norton-looking graphic designer, sitting in a cubicle under florescent lighting, dreaming of punching his boss in the throat. But instead of founding a liposuction-fueled soap company, or a quasi-terrorist underground boxing league, this little culture jammer stuck it to the man by mixing a little mayhem into his package design assignment that the management wouldn’t likely notice right away.

Or actually, I like to think it happened like this…
It was all a big misunderstanding. Some employee of Avery, or their hired design house, got bored and sent out a humorous prank memo to the other designers:

Ha, ha, ha. Paper Street. Everyone in the studio had a good laugh and went about their day, continuing to design packaging with sample labels addressed to “Jane Jones.” Everyone, that is, except that one weird guy who sits in near the door and keeps track of how many donuts you took from the break room. You know that guy? He doesn’t get jokes. He takes everything literally and follows orders without question.

So off he went, dutifully obeying the memo and updating the design he was working on that morning. Two months later, to his surprise, the poor bastard gets canned for sabotaging Avery Dennison’s sterling reputation as a leader in paper solutions. (By God, they would not have their respectable company associated with the awful goings-on at Tyler’s place down on Paper Street!)

Today that graphic designer is bitter and unemployed, holed up in a basement somewhere, silently planning the destruction of Western Civilization. Tyler Durden, indeed.

That’s how I like to think it happened…

I came back a couple weeks later and these labels were gone. Did anyone else happen to notice this little exercise in design anarchy? I know this isn’t something I dreamed or hallucinated on a crack binge, because I have the photos.

Don’t you have a cartoon you’re supposed to be working on? Oh, wait. That’s me. Get back to work!

—- UPDATE! —-

Had I bothered to google this, I would have noticed that everyone in the world has already heard of it. It’s even in the Fight Club trivia at IMDB.

If you do a google search, you’ll find many, many mentions of this little prank. One person even speculated that the character was named after the paper labels. But the author of the original 1996 novel, Chuck Palahniuk, said the name came from a couple people he knew. And the Paper Street address has all kinds of wacky speculated meanings, including linking the two main characters to Puff the Magic Dragon and Jackie Paper.

Anyway, it’s likely the Avery labels came later. And obviously my prank memo hypothesis is still the most plausible explanation.

Seriously, now. Get the hell back to work.

I was messing with some backgrounds for the new short. Here are some early ideas:

I like the idea of sort of finding small things that resemble bigger things. Maybe it can make the environments look more like they just exist, rather than having been drawn by anyone… The pictures you get at the end of a roll of film have that weird film-end thing. I don’t know what causes it, but if you zoom in really close, it can look like a horizon, or a sky.

Then you mess with the color and combine them with other things, like torn paper, concrete, and ink-soaked blotter paper…

…And you start to get things that look like weird, distant landscapes. I’ve got a long way to go to figure out how this all fits together, but these have potential I think:

Please remember that all proceeds from the shop go to the Chris Harding Animal Concern Foundation™ for helping the poor, pathetic animals that Chris Harding makes up in his head.

Peacoctopus:

Rhinostrich:

Roundsnake:

Hippopossumus:

Girant:

I’m adding some new designs to the new shop. One of the Learn Self Defense designs required dumping an entire bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Black Star India Ink on my desk.

This lovely image is going on a poster and some shirts. I hope someone orders one so I can afford to replace my inky desk.

I’m working on a new cartoon. God help us all.

I thought of this idea a couple years ago, and it has evolved a lot during the writing process. I can’t really describe it, but it has something to do with making a living. (That is, the subject of the short is making a living– I doubt any actual living will be made by me from the short).

As I go I’ll post bits and pieces here, and at the Mystery Work In Progress page. Years from now, reading this log will be like going on an archeological excavation through sedimentary layers of creative detritus. (fitting, as this project is unfolding on a geological time scale)

Here are some of the very first thumbnail sketches made for this project. Crude! Crass! I like it already.

CLUES:

What’s the cartoon called?

The title will go unannounced until we’re sure this thing is really going to work out. Stay tuned.

What’s the story about?

Making a living.

When will it be finished?

Sometime in 2011 is our best guess.

May contain one or more of the following:

- satellites
- private moments
- burning at the stake
- birds, dead and alive (also, owls & wild dogs)
- fluorescent lighting
- farmers “doing it”
- the water
- fear, boredom, transcendence, hypocrisy

As usual, almost all sketches are done on lined notebook paper, using Chris Harding’s drawing tool of choice: the Sanford Uni-Ball Onyx Micro rollerball pen. A glorious instrument.

We’ve been redesigning this Web site for the past several months. The old site was all hand coded html, and a real pain in the ass to update. What we needed was a clean, simple site that kind of runs itself. So Lester and I had to learn a bit of php, css, cdc, aarp, cmyk… all that crap. Believe me, that was no small feat. For we are retarded– especially Lester.

It’s finally done. And it’s all dynamic and running on blogging software called WordPress. All I have to do is think of something, and WordPress makes it show up on my Web site. It’s like magic, only clunkier.

Also, we have a couple new nifty things to check out:
- This very Production Log
- The Chris Harding Animation Dispatch mailing list
- A New Shop with actual products
- A Work In Progress page that will one day hold the newest cartoon film

Since it’s been down for about 8 years, here’s a reminder of what the old site looked like. Not bad, actually. Why did we rebuild this again?

Here’s how every interview with every athlete in the history of sports should go:

Sports Reporter: “Heck of a game/match/race! How did you win that game/race/match?”

Athlete: “Well, I was born with a certain genetic potential for this. I worked really, really, really hard and sweated and bled every single day of my whole life to become great. Look at me– I have the brain of a 9 year old. I gave up everything. Today I somehow had enough strength and luck to beat my opponent, who has struggled just as hard. How do you think I did it, asshole? …Hi, Mom!”

Ah, sports reporting.

We are drowning in commentary. Nothing is left to speak for itself. We gotta know what everybody’s doing and how they’re doing it. We gotta get behind the scenes! And most of the time, the secret is very boring: the people who do good work just work really $%&*! hard.

DVDs come with “14 HOURS of extra bonus features!” and commentary tracks. 97% of it is pure, old-fashioned marketing horse shit. (where else in life would you ever hear the word “bonus?”) The rest– the earnest 3%– still tends to be vicarious for the audience, and self-congratulatory for the artists. Hey, how did you make that there movie? As if there were an answer that could be imparted in ninety minutes.

Hi, I’m the director. Welcome to my contractually obligated commentary track. When all the other kids were out playing, I was putting on plays and reading Russian film theory. I poured everything I had into this project for eight years and went broke and got a divorce and my children don’t remember who I am, but the movie came out pretty good thanks to my incredible genius. (until the studio hired a passionless hack to re-cut it with a happy ending, on the recommendation of an out-of-work focus group). Do all that and you can make one too. Oh, and also you’ll need $27 million. ¡Via con dios!

Still, it’s endlessly fascinating to find out how things are made and what artists are thinking. And context really does matter. (Was that play performed under threat of a blacklist? When you yelled, “Screw The Man!” were you in the elevator with your boss, or alone in your car?) But that’s a whole separate exercise from appreciating the work itself.

Beethoven was pretty much deaf when he composed his 9th symphony. But knowing this incredible fact has absolutely zero effect on the way that orgasmic climax in the fourth movement hits your brain stem. When you’re making ze love, you’re not thinking about ze organic chemistry that makes it possible. And if the experience of one of the greatest works of art in history is not enhanced by its own amazing behind-the-scenes story, how much worse is it to endure the commentary on all our lesser little “gems?” Is our commentary just a crutch for weak work?

“Did you like my movie?”

“No, it was pretty bad. It didn’t move me.”

“But I made it under difficult circumstances! My car broke down and it was raining and I ran up my credit card debt! And you probably didn’t notice, because it isn’t communicated in the film, but it’s a witty critique on the injustice of our modern society. Plus, look how cool I dress.”

“Ah! Well, why didn’t you say so?”

…uncomfortable silence…

“So, now do you like it?”

Which brings us to my new Production Log! It won’t make the cartoons better. It’s already boring you half to death. Laurie Anderson said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Which would make writing about animation like, uh, miming about… needlepoint… And yet we persist!

Anyway, even when you’re small potatoes you have to make an effort to take this stuff a little seriously. Having a place to post progress reports and angry thoughts might help me keep things moving, production-wise. And I like the idea of having a record of all this to look back on.

The real question is, why do it in public? For attention? Does everything have to boil down to marketing horse shit? Yes it does. Could anything be more self-indulgent than a windy rant on “commentary” from an amateur animator? You want a peek into the creative soul of another cartoonist? Really?? Well, here we go!

Welcome to my contractually obligated Production Log, friend! Come back often! More pictures, fewer words next time. ¡Via con dios!