The Laugh Out Loud Cats Comic

"Ape Lad" is publishing a brilliant comic strip originally drawn by his grandfather in 1913.
THE LAUGH OUT LOUD CATS can be viewed on this link here.
And originals are available too. I just wish I had thought of this first!

Another Great Art Direction Book

http://www.amazon.com/Stepping-into-Picture-Cartoon-Designer/dp/1934110434/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6864687-5767045?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186686896&sr=8-1

Go order this book now.
It's the first in-depth study of the work of one of the great animation art directors, MAURICE NOBLE.
It'll be out in February 2008, which is a bit long to wait, and it's a bit pricey, but it will be worth every minute and dollar.

With this book and Hans Bacher's DREAMWORLDS available in the same year, animated films can't help but look better!

Another Bob

This just goes to show you how unreliable photos are for caricaturs. This is another shot of Bob Clampett, and his facial structure and even the thickness of his eyebrows appear very different than the photo printed just below. I used this one for my caricature.

Part Two Warner Brothers Caricature...

This is Part Two of the caricature entry, so you'll have to read backwards.
So now that I had the pictures of all four of them, I started working up rough sketches, starting with Clampett.
Tough man to draw. He photographed differently each time. A shot taken from his famous 'home movies' at Warners shows the little-kid Chuck, and Bob with a very long face and lantern jaw--exactly like his caricatures. But this photo shows him with a square jaw and strong chin, but no lantern jaw.
Why he photographed that way in stills is a mystery, but perhaps the photographer got him from a good angle.

This is why it is never a good idea to draw from photographs; life is always better, and if your subject is not alive, a motion picture will do just as well. It is very important to see the muscles of the face working, expressions, and so on. For example, Bob Clampett had dimples. They only showed in one of the photos--clearly not this one. Friz Freleng's freckles also did not photograph. Chuck has a boyish quality that does not come across in my caricature, but I knew him better than the others and know that he had a mischievous streak in him. If he looks a little manic here, that's his inner Coyote showing through.
Well anyway I got the whole thing done this morning, and once Didier's designer puts the type and title on the page, it will be done.

That Warner Brothers Mob

My old friend Didier Ghez has published a number of interviews with Disney artists in five books called WALT'S PEOPLE.

Each book boasts black and white cover caricatures of the interviewees by Peter Emslie.

Didier asked me to work up some caricatures of some of the Warner directors for the cover of his newest book, BUGS' BUDDIES, which will be published in 2008.

Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Friz Freleng's work is well known to everyone; but their faces are not. They are far less well known than most of the Disney people--although to most people outside the animation world, Disney artists also have no faces.

To make matters even more difficult for myself I decided I wanted to draw each of these men in their prime, as young men.

I'd known Chuck Jones pretty well, when he was already rather old, and met each of the other three only once.

The first thing I decided to do was use characters associated with each director as his 'shadow'. I also had the quaint conceit that the characters would be in color, and the men's faces would be black and white artwork. The characters came to life through their imaginations, and have survived them. That was sort of the idea, at any rate. Maybe I really did it because it sort of looked cool.

Didier was enthusiastic about the idea. Now came the fun part. Where did I find pictures of some of these guys as young men?

Some were in the Warner books, but the difficulty of working from photos is: the face can look different from different angles, and at different ages in a person's life. Chuck Jones looked about seven years old in one picture that Greg Ford kindly sent to me.

Caricatures the guys did of themselves were no help at all. The WArner crew was vicious--toward themselves--. Bob Clampett drew himself as a turkey necked longfaced geek with a beaky nose, receding chin, and a huge head of hair. Photos reveal him to have resembled a young Elvis--classic features, small nose, dark eyes, strong chin, square jaw and face. If he'd been born twenty years later he could have been a matinee idol. At least the dark pompadour was accurate in his caricatures.

Chuck Jones was even less kind to himself. He's frequently caricatured in the Warner cartoons as an overweight, blubberlipped straw-haired pinhead. And Chuck designed all of his own characters!

I could not believe it, but Little John in the hilarious RABBIT HOOD ("Da-a-a-a-a-h, Don't you worry, never fear! Robin Hood will soon be here!") was a caricature of Chuck, by Chuck.

Friz Freleng was usually drawn as a sort of chameleon lizard, with a tremendous snozz and receding forehead.

Tex Avery looked elfin; his caricatures came closest to suggesting what he actually looked like. Some good shots of him appear at the top of this post.

So what to do?

Well, some of the photos of the fellows had better angles than others. I was lucky enough to find a shot of Chuck and Friz in a turnover session, together. Chuck is revealed to have had a strong chin, a round face, and fine straight hair. He also had remarkable eyebrows that were shaped like upside down V's. You can see everything but the 'eyebrows' in the pasteup at the head of this post. They were too light to photograph.

Friz wasn't lizardlike at all, though he does appear to have a slightly sloping forehead. The receding hairline is probably his most prominent feature. He does not have a large nose. (he was always drawn with one!)

Part Two of this article continues above: the finished illustration is shown below. You'll figure it out, which is more than I did when publishing this stuff.

A couplea Books

BUGS' BUDDIES
Book cover design and caricature by Nancy Beiman
Caricatures (L To R, top ) Tex Avery, Friz Freleng
Bottom: Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones
Editor: Didier Ghez
Publication date: 2008

Hans Bacher's DREAMWORLDS will be published in English by Focal Press on December 7.

The book was copyedited by yours truly, but Hans did the real work assembling treasure trove of artwork from dozens of films. His color sketches from BALTO, LION KING, MULAN and other well known animated films are here, and there are some splendidly restored multiplane backgrounds from BAMBI under a section called 'Masters". This is the first book of its kind written by a working art director. It's not a history book--it shows you how to think out color and design when creating an animated world.

You can see the preorder form here:

Hans has had several blogs that show excerpts from the book, but I think his latest blog is the best. It's called animation-treasures 1 and can be viewed here. Hans showcases the work of many art directors and reconstructs pan backgrounds from everything from a Fleischer tabletop setup to a Zagreb short.This gets my vote for one of the most marvelous sites on the Web--the analysis of the color scripting in WHAT'S OPERA DOC is priceless.

Read. Learn. And marvel at how many wonderful artists worked in animation. It's a great medium when people are allowed to be creative!

Funny Stuff

My friend Gizmo the cat has introduced me to the very funny, crazy feline world. I had always thought cats were dignified, aloof creatures, not dependent like dogs--

Well, cats can't be generalized as a species; the personality of the animal, like that of a human, is pretty much is determined by its family upbringing and genetics. In other words,cats must be judged as individuals, not en masse. And some cats, such as Gizmo and a few others that I have met, love to play, look silly, cuddle, and generally act like a dog. Gizmo even runs to greet me whenever I come home. This is a nice treat and I'm grateful for it.

There is a very funny website called I Can Has Cheezburger? featuring ridiculous captions to photos of cats. Some vary in cleverness. Some are hilarious, some just rude or stupid, but most are a very entertaining way to start the day.

Curiously enough other animals besides cats are sometimes featured, including the "Lolrus" and various rodents with corms. My fave was the bunny eating cookies. If you visit the site, look under 'foodz' or 'cookie' at the bottom of the page to see the cookie thief.

Cookies are a major theme on the site.

The picture in this post appeared on the site recently and I thought it was a hoot. It's captioned in proper English, which is unusual for the lolcats: usually they speak a weird lingo distantly related to Krazy Kat's Yiddish-influenced prattle...the Lolcat language fuses Southern slang, text messaging, and onomatopoeia. Some terms are already becoming 'standard'--at least within a small group.

Do not want!

Want!

I has a....

I'm in yr....

Nom Nom Nom (sound of cat eating) This one is my favorite.

Anyway, here's a famous image from the site. The lolcats are guaranteed to raise a smile.

Down near the main road is one of the 'chicken houses'. I liked the sign.

The lowest picture is a view of a storeroom and a bicycle cart. Twin Oaks has an amazing stable of superannuated bicycles, most of which are communal. After two weeks I was tooling around on a once-red, now rust-red model that ran okay as long as you stayed on the farm.

The second shot is the view I saw every morning from near Aurora cabin. The 'garden' or farm, is seen here. That's a greenhouse in the distance with some of the most amazing heirloom tomatoes I ever saw--one weighed four pounds, was yellow and red and orange stripes, and fed around forty people. The top shot is what you saw when you turned off the main road onto Twin Oaks. This is the barn where a lot of chickens live, and it's also the last thing some of the cows ever see.

Twin Oaks Images

This is the hammock shop. People have private rooms over the shop. It's in the courtyard, which is the original center of the community. The Twin Oakers built this building and named it after a Chinese commune.
Note the flower garden. That is a hammock 'jig' off to the right.

TWIN OAKS: A Hippie Corporation

I decided to get as far away from academe and animation as possible and do something I have wanted to do for several decades.I spent three weeks as a visitor at Twin Oaks Egalitarian Community near Louisa, Virginia from June 22nd to July 12. Twin Oaks is a communal and 'egalitarian' society that was founded forty years ago by far seeing people who wanted an alternative to the modern way of life without sacrificing a reasonable standard of living. Hence its income-sharing, communal philosophy.

Oddly enough the original attitude is schizophrenically combined with a very successful pair of businesses that have to work within the outer capitalist economy. Twin Oaks makes very good hammocks and tofu products. They also do book indexing on the side. This means that like it or not, they are a corporation that keeps business hours. I heard a lot of talk about 'budget'. When I expressed bewilderment (since no money ever changes hands on the farm, it is all done with hourly labor on the trust system) it was explained that the 'labor budget' was still something that the managers had to work within. In that respect Twin Oaks was little different from a large animation studio which also has timesheets with hourly segments where you have to write down which project you were on, and balance the quotas by the end of the week. I had no trouble understanding this system. Some of the 'cos', as the members are called, were gobsmacked that they had something in common with a cartoon studio!

They have the problem of modern civilization mostly licked here. MOSTLY, because they can't give up certain things. I did not expect a Luddite community but was surprised to find DVD and video players, washers that mostly worked (I expected hand operated ones along with the electric, and greywater recycling--the latter is being discussed, apparently). There was chocolate cake nearly every night. They had austerity for a few years and coffee was rationed and is still hard to come by on the farm; but chocolate is considered essential. I have no problem with that.
The diet was largely vegetarian; meat was a hard product to come by. Chicken was a rarity since the foxes appear to get most of the pullets. Occasionally a 'beefy' was available for steak or pot roast. I didn't say no. Though I'm nominally a vegetarian, I gave some consideration: which is more environmentally sound--a cow raised on grass about a hundred feet from where I was living, or a tofu product that took a tremendous amount of electricity (which is largely supplied by a nearby nuclear plant!)? And the soybeans have to be purchased from another farm. Their soy products are superior to anything else I have tried, but they are not sold nationally.

Twin Oaks has some solar panels on all buildings, but only one part of one building is completely solar powered and thus off the grid.

Since they run the hammock and tofu business as their main income producers and deal with bulk orders, they have to make some concession to modernity so a high speed Internet connection is also a necessity. Twin Oaks is a 502 corporation. I am told they have the same tax classification as monasteries. Each full member is a sort of corporate board member with a full share in the community. There is no real seniority system after you have been there six months; you are a full member and have the same rights as someone who has been there for six years. There is no Chairman or board of directors, though there are Planners and managers.

They have a lot of problems keeping the managers in place due to high turnover (eighty per cent of the inhabitants are under the age of 30 and some of them like to travel to other communes after a year or so in place, due to itchy feet. There are two smaller communities within shouting distance and there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and labor tradeoffs. It's good that this is in place, for if you have a quarrel with someone, you can go to Acorn and work sorting seeds until things have quieted down.)

I was the only visitor over the age of twenty in the visitor group We had six visitors in the Aurora Cabin. (Each house at Twin Oaks is named after an earlier commune, and it was appopriate that I would be in one that was named for Roycroft). The other visitors were all very young people, some away from home for the first time. They apparently don't get too many people my age. I shouldn't wonder that the residents were playing Survivor and betting that I would be the first person 'off the island'. As it turns out, one of the young boys caught a chill and panicked and went home after a week, despite my assurances (and his doctor father's) that he would be all right. Personally I think that he overreacted to a stomach bug; it was not as if we were in the Australian Outback, after all. And I have been in the Australian Outback so I should know.

In the event of a serious problem there is a former member who is a doctor nearby. In the event of a REALLY serious problem the local authorities have the coordinates of Twin Oaks on a map and send in a chopper to lift you out.
But the young man disappeared the next morning.

Two other visitors elected to go to Acorn after two weeks. This left me and a young man with one wing each of the Aurora cabin, since the third visitor was living in one of the main houses with his girlfriend, who was a guest of one of the members and therefore a bit higher in the hierarchy.

Twin Oaks has great relations with the local community. There are tours all the time from high schools and social groups and outsiders in general. (The commune has a 'no nudity' law until after seven p.m., when the visitors can be expected to have left.) The swimming hole was presumably not one of the stops on the tour.

The local representative is a former 'co'! Now how nice is that.
A large black dog named Bob is a frequent visitor (he belongs to the rep) and has a sort of canine ministry without portfolio, or much else either.

I could not 'garden', as farming is called here, because of my bad knees. After a week I found stuff I could do. I cooked a lot of meals. It is no harder to cook for a hundred people than for one; all you need is the right equipment and materials. The kitchen tools looked like what Buster Keaton used in THE NAVIGATOR (and some were probably the same vintage.) They had industrial stoves in the kitchen and some really great equipment, including a 'buffalo chopper' that I believe COULD chop the entire buffalo without breaking a sweat. I was scared of this thing at first until it was demonstrated that it was a lot safer than a home Cuisinart. I also did some light gardening on a seed patch that grew stock for the Acorn commune (this had to be kept separate from the farm, since they were 'heirloom seeds' that could not cross pollinate with others.) And I helped make a lot of hammocks. Over a hundred tied off, by my own count (with a 'bowline knot'--useful skill to know.)

I also saw chicks hatch, innumerable butterflies and bees in the gorgeous herb gardens and the smaller gardens that decorated the entire community, thanks to the loving efforts of some expert herbalists and gardeners. There have been no fertilizers other than natural compost or pesticide sprays used on this land for forty years and it made me wonder why anyone would bother with them when things were obviously going so well without chemicals.
Pest control was mostly done with squashing 'em. I soaked broccoli well to eliminate potato bugs, and got one mosquito bite per day. Worth it though. There were marvels to see. The hummingbird moth was called a 'lobster tail moth' down there. It's only the second one I have seen in my life.

They have cows and chickens but no other farm animals. I learned a lot about both creatures--they have more complex lives than most of us give them credit for.
It is something to hold a newhatched baby chick in your hands. They are way cute--and come in the most amazing colors. Some were striped, some were pure black, all were up and running within hours of coming out of the egg. But cute or not, they were someone's chicken dinner in a few month's time. It's the way things are on a farm.
Cows had a slightly better time of it, but the 'beefies', or young steers, had three years to play around before they were taken behind the barn and shot, then processed. Their mothers were treated similarly after they ceased giving milk.
No one really got acquainted with the 'beefies', and so there were no emotional ties to sever when it came time for them to go, but it was harder when one had to kill a cow that had a name, that one had probably milked for years. It's what is done on a farm. Life and death are both daily occurrences there. You learn to respect both.
An injured goose that one co had tried to nurse back to health for three weeks was eventually put out of her misery and used to bait a trap to catch the fox or coyote that had given her the original injuries.

A tiny stray kitten named Olive loved to swing in the hammocks and swear at passers by. She eventually let me scratch her head and was generally becoming more domesticated. Probably the rest of her family was eaten by raccoons or foxes, since she was defensive toward anything canid. This tiny cat, who could not have weighed more than five pounds, attacked three of the much larger four dogs on sight, except for the 18 year old nearly-blind bitch who looked great but did not have much of her sprightly personality any more. Good diet means the dogs and cats live a long time. There is a long waiting list for pet owners to bring a furball down with them.

I missed my Gizmo girl. The neighbours took good care of her, but I still missed not having the furball in bed every night, purring. You get used to things like that.

It is ironic that Twin Oaks makes its living on a highly processed food (tofu) and a luxury item (hammocks) sold to the same leisure society they left. They are completely bound to the timing and rules of the capitalist system, which means you really CAN'T pick your working hours there. Twin Oaks is in a symbiotic relationship with it though certainly not on a horrible scale. Here, an overdrawn account is a Labor Hole (not enough work put into the communal business.)

Will Twin Oaks survive if the market for this luxury item drops out with an economic downturn? Of course. They survived losing sixty per cent of their outside income when Pier One Imports dropped them two years ago. They grow sixty per cent of their food, including raising beef and dairy cattle, have their own water source onsite, and with some economies they can get by. "At least," one co said to me "until the neighbours show up with guns."

Another long time resident told me that they only reason Twin Oaks survived for forty years was that they had Pier One underwriting their enterprise. They are just only getting back on their feet after being dropped as a supplier...and Pier One is apparently trying to talk to them again. Developments may be coming up in a few months' time.

On the whole they have a good life at Twin Oaks. They eat like kings and live on a higher standard than about 90 per cent of the planet. Quite a few people there did not find regular employment in the outside world or did not want to climb the ladders in their current jobs. As for the social scene, that's for another letter.

I enjoyed waking up to birdsong, listening to the sounds of birds and the rain (when it came,) and seeing marvels like a black snake climbing a tree as easy as water flowing, if water flowed uphill.
It was a good exercise in simple living. "The earth is trying to rid it self, by all available means, from the cancer that is humanity!" one Co said to a group of younger people. "I have always attempted to be a benign tumour," I replied.

And I got a totally undeserved rapturous welcome from Gizmo when I finally did get home. Cats, like cows and chickens, have a deeper interior life than we give them credit for.

Going to the Movies

I've entered THE OTHER EDEN in eight film festivals. In this case, eight is enough. Only one of them was free of an admission charge, and I want to see if it does well in any of them before venturing into others. The festivals are evenly spaced throughout the year.

Some of the names of the other festivals are pretty entertaining. They might conceivably be more entertaining than some of their entries; imagine a resume that included festivals like

DARRYL'S HARD LIQUOR AND PORN FESTIVAL

THE EVIL CITY FILM FESTIVAL

HELL'S HALF MILE FILM FESTIVAL

SHOW OFF YOUR SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL

and last but certainly not least,
SMOGDANCE FILM FEST (in sunny Pasadena, no less.)

MFA

Graduation went well. We were ushered into a rather hot parking lot on Friday to hear Bill Clinton give the commencement address. It was such a pleasure to hear a (former) President using words of three syllables, speaking in coherent sentences, and pronouncing ‘genome’ and ‘geneticist’ without stumbling.

I sat next to a professor who sniffed loudly and muttered sotto voce like Popeye for most of the speech. He may have been a Republican but he was also very rude. Fortunately he wasn’t loud enough to make much of a difference. I found him comic rather than otherwise. Why did he show up at all if he did not like the speaker?

The other honoree was a Mr. Sasakawa who runs leprosy clinics around the world and has helped save 15 million lives. This gentleman did not speak English but had a commanding presence on the stage.

I literally wore two hats during the ceremony. Faculty robes were reserved for me, but since I was graduating I stood in line with the Design students rather than with the Film and Animation faculty. More than one person came over to ask why I was in the wrong line; I explained the situation and received their applause (along with that of most of the students) when I finally did ‘the walk’ as the second grad student in the department.
The actual sheepskin will arrive in a few weeks but I am told that it is official. It must be official; I am wearing a school ring…

YOUR FEETS TOO BIG (Legal edition)

Heigh ho there,

So I lied...here's a second post for today.

All of you who would like to get a legal copy of YOUR FEETS TOO BIG can do so by getting this record on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Centennial-Collection-Fats-Waller/dp/B0001VOHGG/ref=sr_1_19/103-6864687-5767045?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1180086459&sr=1-19

My film is on the DVD insert. Color timing is bad but it's complete.
And no, I don't get royalties. The tradeoff was: the film was put on the disc without MY having to pay them, since RCA released the compilation.

That is why I will never again work with a track that I do not have full rights to.

YouTube and MyTube

I have mixed feelings about YouTube. On the one hand I value it as a teaching aid--there is amazing nature footage that is either completely out of print or never released in this country. On the other hand they post a lot of material that is copyrighted, usually without notifying the owner. I've just had this happen to one of my own films.
I'm fond of honoring copyrights since I'm the one who, in this case, made a film and paid a very high price for music rights that did not include new media or home video rights. Someone else posted YOUR FEETS TOO BIG on YouTube, but I'm the one who will be contacted by RCA Records for copyright violation if it stays up.
So I did what I had to to and asked YouTube to immediately take the film down.
I then contacted CartoonBrew and told them that the problem was with the soundtrack; I don't care if the animation is posted online as long as I am credited with making the film, but any online posts cannot include the track.
My new film THE OTHER EDEN has a track with rights that are free and clear, but since I am entering it in several festivals that state that it should not appear online until after the festival judging is completed, it will not be available for viewing except on DVDS for now. Certain people have received prints and they will be asked to forbear from sharing it for the time being.
I do not enjoy using bootleg 0nline prints for teaching and would rather buy nice clean copies on DVD, but until some distributors see fit to release material that is now only available in other countries, I'll still view YouTube for the duration. But you will not catch me posting anything except comments.

THE OTHER EDEN

Here are some stills from my new film, THE OTHER EDEN. All artwork for this film was created and modified in Photoshop and After Effects 7. (all right, I lied. One drawing was scanned in, but it is not in any of the stills here.)

I wanted a pastel and pencil look but also wanted to finish the film in ten weeks, since it was required for an independent study. The result turned out well enough for me to enter it in a couple three film festivals. I don't expect it to win anything, but it would be nice to see it screened.

The film was based on a nightmare I had last December about the disappearing wildlife on planet Earth. Sadly, the nightmare is become reality.

The original title was THE LAST but since my dad hated the title I decided to go to Shakespeare since over 1,500 other authors have done so for titles over the last four centuries. So a misquote from RICHARD II serves as an ironic title to this two minute animated film.

I Sell Out in L.A.

PREPARE TO BOARD! sold out at the Van Eaton Gallery signing. And yes, there were more than two people there buying books...more like two hundred!
35 copies of my book sold well before the end of the event and I was therefore able to do a little socializing, or would have been able to if I wasn't horribly jetlagged and looking rather zombielike. Several people asked me if I was okay, which means I wasn't.
But it was fun. And I got some fine books, shipped 'em home and found them here waiting for me along with the cat. Thanks, Post Office, for preventing me from carrying them!
I and my friend Dean Yeagle were also invited to visit the Film Roman and Walt Disney Feature Animation studios, where we saw fun things that cannot be talked about here. I won't discuss pots and pans this time, but will only state that it was a whirlwind trip...and included meeting a client who is about to produce his first series. I got back late yesterday night and am adjusting to the time, but the Kitty Alarm Clock had me up right when I wanted to be, this morning. Poor Gizmo was 'starved for attention' even though she was petted by the neighbours...so she'll get some extra pats and cuddles to thank her for being a good girl. And since she is also the cover girl on PREPARE TO BOARD, she probably should be getting royalties (this translates to: a new fuzzy mouse.)

More later...still pooped...but PTB is below 10,000 on the Amazon.com list, which I guess means that it is doing well. More importantly, people seem to like it.
The proof will come with the students who are taking the character design class and using it; the assignments, I note, have been working out better and have a shorter learning curve than in previous classes.

A Book Review

PREPARE TO BOARD! was just favorably reviewed on the Animation World Network's website. You can read the review here:

Busy, Busy, Busy

I had the sort of weekend that I thought I'd said goodbye to when I left New York City. (it's usually a lot quieter here on weekends.) Mike Genz visited from Edinboro University, we saw the ANIMATION SHOW at the Little Theatre, and I got a large quantity of work done on my new film.
What, you did not know I was making a new film? Well, every 25 years I drop whatever I am doing and make one. And the number was up so I had to do it.
Actually, I did make some other short films since YOUR FEETS' TOO BIG but they are no longer viewable on modern media since they were made for CD-I projects at Phillips Sidewalk Studio in the early nineties. Too bad. HELP ME RHONDA was rather good; it only survives now as a pencil test on my reel.
Now the new one had to be made for a class, so I figured that a horrible nightmare that I had last December would do nicely because I could not think of anything else that I could do that interested me as much. The title fluctuated a bit but after some discussions with my father, who thought the original title noisome, I decided I'd go to Shakespeare (whom I'm also studying) and get an idea from him since so many other folks have.
So the film is now called THE OTHER EDEN.
And there is not a single piece of paper in it. All artwork was drawn and modified on the computer.
This is not to say that it looks like it was done there; I dislike the 'computery' look of most Flash animation and wanted a more organic feel. AE7 (after effects to you non geeks out there) gave me some remarkable effects that, when combined, actually resemble colored pencil renderings and pastel sketches. At times I'm using up to seven modifications of the original artwork, and the result is sort of pleasing. I say sort of since I do not yet know if the entire idea is off kilter or not. For one thing it is not funny. It was not meant to be. After all it was based on a nightmare. This nightmare was remarkably precise; I actually saw the shots and cuts that I use in the film. But some things were added after I woke up.
So anyway THE OTHER EDEN will wrap in a few weeks. It's fun being able to turn out 14 feet a day, I can tell you. But it is not character animation and was not meant to be.

Mike Genz liked the look of it so that was one impartial judge. A few students have also seen it and they seem to be impressed. The Upstairs Neighbours also thought it was working. So I reckon that I will enter it in some film festivals afterward. Couldn't hurt.

Speaking of festivals the ANIMATION SHOW played at the Little. I was disappointed with some offerings but pleased with others; my favorites being Joanna Quinn's DREAMS AND DESIRES, which should have won the Oscar this year, and Bill Plympton's THE GUIDE DOG, and a very funny film from France about two idiotic Samurai armies fighting over nothing called VERSUS.
NINE was well made but lacking in story and, I felt, overrated. The others in the show did not register much with me. It was good to see many of our students and some faculty in the audience.

The weather has been sneeting (snow, sleet) and slaining (snowrain) for days now. It's just becoming tiresome, and L.A has never looked so good to me as now. Amusingly enough they are over cast and rainy, too.
Well, we'll be in a bookstore so don't need the sun much.
I'm off to L.A. tomorrow for the book signing, and so will be posting in a few days when I'm back.
Cheers til then.