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.

I’m currently wrapped up in a really busy few weeks in my day job at the quarry, and I’m also working on a big pitch for some freelance job that– trust me– you do not want to hear about. So there’s not a lot of real production going on right now, and not a lot to write about in the production log.

So instead I’ll post a few more old drawings, just for the hell of it.

Here are some storyboards and a screen grab from one of my very first animated projects– an ecard for shockwave.com. Chad Strawderman and I used to animate many things for shockwave at our web animation studio, Goldhouse Creative.

This one was a Mother’s Day card involving a very ugly baby bird. Mothers are nice, aren’t they? Hi, Mom! You’ll notice that the sketches look waaaaaay better than the final piece. Someday I’ll figure out a way to not ruin my drawings by inking them.

Work in the Mystery Work in Progress continues. But depending on how things go over the next few weeks, there’s a slim chance I’ll have a kind of big freelance job to do, which would set back the short another couple months! On the other hand, it would also fund the short. So that would be progress in a way… we’ll see…

Here are some more old sketchbook pages:

More background research!

Last summer I bought a cheap toy camera at a toy store in Florida. It’s a Holga-like thing that takes 4 pictures in rapid sequence on a single frame of 35mm film. The view finder is a little plastic rectangle that hinges on from the top of the camera, and the lense is cheap plastic. So 90% of the photos come out complete crap. But the other ten percent are nice research for the Mystery Work in Progress.

There needs to be a kind of dream-like haze in this cartoon. These photos are not exactly the right look, but they do have a certain feeling. I’m trying to get a piece of this action in my backgrounds. (see the previous post about background research)