The 8 or 10 of you who read this production log have no doubt been wondering, “Where has Chris been lately? Has he fallen ill? Joined the Army? Gone to prison? Has he killed again?! Oh, dear. We should have kept a closer eye on him! We blame ourselves!”

It’s a funny thing, life. The last post I made here was about how I burned out on comic strips at the age of 23, and have never looked back.

Well, in putting that post together, I was forced to look back. And with ten years’ distance, I actually kind of liked what I saw.

Long story short, I’ve been experimenting with something new.

I might be announcing this new thing in about a month. It takes a different approach to the same material I’ve already been dealing with in the Mystery Work In Progress. Work on the short will continue too. But the story and its characters have become too big for one short, and have splintered into two projects– one animated, and one NOT ANIMATED! What?! Yes.

I feel very weird and unsure about all this. These past couple of months have been a hell of a bizarre trip, with flashbacks and strange feelings of being young again, even though I can’t stay up past 9:30 anymore. But I’m following my gut, and that’s never failed me before! (oh, wait…)

Stay tuned!

Here are some specimens from the ol’ robot entomology collection. Might these have anything to do with the Mystery Work in Progress? They might. But I’m not sure yet. The words that best describe the Mystery Work in Progress are: a) “Mysterious,” and b) “In Progress.”

So last night I put Post-It Notes on my fingers and waved my hand in front of a video camera for a few seconds. Why did I do this? Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. It’s much too high tech for me to explain. It’s all part of my patented Cargo Cult animation process.

This has nothing to do with the cartoon, but I noticed in the background of my weird little green screen experiment, you can see a hilarious NYT Style Magazine spread on my desk. On the left is an article called Starved to Perfection: Why Are We Not Entitled to Take Up Space?, which documents the horrible images many women have of their bodies, and their obsession with looking thinner at all costs. Fair enough.

On the page facing the article is an ad for Tummy Tuck Jeans shrieking:

INSTANT GRATIFICATION!
LOOK ONE SIZE SMALLER!

This is obviously a subject NYT Style and their advertisers take very seriously. And as you can imagine, it really got me thinking… about how fat and disgusting my hand looks in this video! God! It’s so fat and ugly! My finger is, like, bulging out around my ring! God!

I’m putting my hand on a lettuce and cigarette diet until it’s pretty again.

Scene 2 of the Mystery Work in Progress is coming along nicely. (I’m only on scene 2! Dear God, when will it end?!)

Scene 1 was pretty much done when it became apparent a major character redesign was needed. At every step of the process, the characters have asserted their “robotness,” even though I wanted to make them very organic and bendy like the original sketches. They just seem to want to move and act like machines. I think it serves the story well, so I’m letting it happen. And by “letting,” I mean struggling through hours and hours of painful trial and error. But in the past week I’ve stumbled on bodies that are beginning to work, and am nearly done reworking scene 1 and some of scene 2.

In the early stages of animation on a short, it takes a while to get the rhythm of the characters. So there tends to be a lot of “over-acting” which mellows out as I move along. (get lazy)

To the right is a still from scene 2. I didn’t want to spoil anything, so I shrunk it down a little.

The Mystery Work in Progress continues, at an agonizing pace, behind closed doors. (can you hear the weeping?)

In the mean time, here is another project that’ll be coming up next year. Tom Potter, an educator I knew and respected growing up, is making a documentary adaptation of a book called The Saber-Tooth Curriculum. Tom will direct and produce the documentary, and I will contribute an animated segment from a script he’s written.

Production is set to begin January 2008, so it’s still early in the process. Here is a link to the official site, as well as some very early style sketches:

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.

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)