Onward! Making the short! Basic animation for the first scene is pretty much done. That’s no big deal, I suppose. And yet, it is! The first scene is always hard, so it’s a great feeling to have it in the bag. But there are many, many more to go, and most of them are more complex than this one. So don’t get cocky, folks.

In other news, Learn Self Defense has just been released on a new DVD collection called Shorts! Volume 4. It’s a real classy collection with 3 hours of award winning films, including the Oscar nominated short, Maestro. Also, there are 2 ridiculous, superfluous commentary tracks by me, with introductions by my mom. So, uh… go buy it here!

Speaking of the Oscar shorts, we went to see them over the weekend (except the Pixar short, which wasn’t included in the show). I’m not sure about all the nominees… some really great ones were left out, by all accounts. But we did like The Danish Poet, which won the big prize. Isn’t it weird to think of filmmaking as a contest than can be won?

Get back to work, you lazy bastards!

Here’s another fragment from the Work In Progress. This one’s really “behind the scenes,” being all wireframey and whatnot.

By the time I get finished with this thing, it should be possible for anybody to reconstruct the entire cartoon from the various bits and pieces I’ve posted here in the log.

All the fruitless pitching and tap dancing for freelance work is quiet for the moment. I’m glad to be back where I belong– working on a short in the basement at night.

These are some fragments of screen grabs that may or may not make the final cut. I’ve had to develop a completely new style for this story, and the early scenes like this one may seem heavy handed by the end of the process. So I reserve the right to redo them later. But progress is definitely being made, and the new look should support the story well.

And now, the weather report:
The low last night in Kansas City was absolute zero. All atoms in the area have ceased vibrating and all matter has disintigrated into subatomic dust. For your five day forcast, expect an endless, silent blackness for all eternity.

I do not understand why human beings settled in a place that’s completely inhospitable to life. It’s like living on the damn moon. I need to get one of those sun lamps that tricks your brain into thinking the sky hasn’t been blacked out by the wrath of god.

That is all. Get back to work!

This is a small screenshot from a motion test I just did for a pitch for a freelance job. I had to try to emulate the style of some existing animation, which I can’t really do. Man, I suck at pitching. How do people do it?

Remember when you were a kid and you liked to draw and make up stories? So you’d spend hours inventing characters and learning to draw them? Maybe they weren’t brilliant or anything, but they were unique and they were yours and they were somehow genuine. So you’d show the pictures to your friends and they would say, “Wow, that’s a pretty good drawing.” And you’d say, “Thanks. I worked really hard to–” And they would say, “Draw me a picture of Spiderman.”

That never ends.

This is what it would look like if there were Teddy Bear cannibals and they shrunk the heads of their enemies to make necklaces and such.