Project Blue Book

Goodbye, blogger.

2012-01-28T03:22:00.003-05:00

I seem to move blogging platforms every 5 years or so. However, this may be my last move as I've jumped to one hosted on my own site. I hope you'll follow me there!

Join me at Bombsfall.com!

Update those links!

World/Inferno Shirt #7,137

2012-01-11T04:52:00.004-05:00

The World/Inferno Friendship Society is going back out on tour in the next few weeks. This is one of the new shirts I've designed for them. Go catch them live!

Making Things : Hard Times Come Again No More

2012-01-08T06:50:00.001-05:00

This is going to be a second-in-a-row post about the life of a professional creative. I try not to load up on these too much. There's always a danger of gazing so long into one's own navel that one spends more time talking ABOUT something than DOING something. But there you go. I just finished up some scribbly storyboards this weekend, so perhaps we'll have a new installment of My Boards Are Horrfyingly Ugly later this week. I'm also about to start on a series of posts that have nothing to do with business, and it could last for a long time. There are some big changes coming on the blog-front as well. Also I have some cool small-project things to talk about later this month. So stay tuned.

Anyway, let's talk about some hard stuff. You up for it?

I am in the midst of a dry, dry season. You wouldn't know it by looking from the outside. It's been the busiest, most productive year of my life. I've produced a reasonable amount of work that I'm am reasonably proud of. I've had some truly wonderful clients and have been honored to create some cool stuff with them. I've been featured here and there on the internet more than I once was. I've made a lot of new internet friends and for the first time have a reliable stream of blog readers and work followers. But other than the aforementioned clients, almost none of that pays very well. I'm having one of those periods where I am swimming in awesome, paying gigs that are stalled on the runway. And to be honest, things could really be better on the financial front.

There is a tendency, especially in an environment as mercenary and unstable as freelance animation, to overstate how well things are going. We're all doing fine, we're all busy, have you seen our new stuff? We don't talk about how many of us don't have health insurance, or have put off having children, or use our credit cards to pay the odd bill more than we'd like to admit. We don't talk about the times we've borrowed money from family, and how that makes us feel. We talk about the poor conditions for freelancers in today's market, but we often skip the real-life consequences. We laugh about how fashionable DIY is, but skip the fact that many of us came into doing so many things ourselves because we couldn't afford the alternative. That, and my homemade granola is way better than store-bought. My wife made vichyssoise last week that was to die for. Just saying. We ate it piping hot since it's winter here. It was like sipping a bear hug. I wish I could email you some, but technology just hasn't lived up to its promise in this regard.

There is no shame in hard times. We all have them. Some have them their entire lives. But, at least in my country, there is a very real shame in not doing very well. If one has the audacity to be actually poor, it is seen by large swaths of the country as a character failing. If only we would just take a shower, put on a suit and go find a job. Being an artist is only seen as a job if it is going well. Even someone like me who makes his living as a commercial artist, doing work for businesses and organizations who pay actual hard currency, is often seen as one who lucked into a fake job. When you are doing well, you're a professional. When you're not, you never had a real job in the first place.

And so I find myself hesitant to say things like "Things could be better on the financial front". I worry that I will sound self-pitying, that some ridiculous ass will say "First World Problems!", that I'll come across as somehow asking for a handout, that I'll be opening myself to looking (for lack of a better term) weak in the face of a very difficult business.

This is the fear that many (bad) clients prey upon. I've had a few offers recently to do work for very, very little money. And I haven't taken them. Why? Several reasons. I would be spending a good month on a project that wouldn't even cover the bills racked up during that period. It would have set a cost precedent with that client. I'd be contributing to the further-lowering of standards in my own industry and hurting my own efforts to get back on track. I was on the phone will someone a month ago who wanted to pay me $1000 for 4 weeks of work. I said no. That's now $1000 I don't have. And that was my decision. Sure, it made no sense to take the job. But when times are lean there is a lot of pressure to feel actual guilt over skipping any offer of payment, no matter how unscrupulous, especially when one has a wife and a cat who rely on you in part to make ends meet. They are both super supportive (at least my wife is - the cat has been silent on the matter), but there is something in my culture, my upbringing, my expectations for myself that feels guilty for making that choice, even when I feel it was the right one. And that's something I have to live with. I think back to last year when I turned down a very nice project because the client was involved in some human rights violations. I mean, they had Amnesty International on their back, protests about them in multiple countries and even a damning documentary or two. I'm not mentioning this to act like I'm some saint- everyone makes choices like this. Everyone has that line they don't cross when it comes to work they will or won't do. This was, unfortunately, over that line. However, had I done that project I would have been financially set for months and had a great piece for my portfolio. I'd be dining out right now and have a working relationship with a studio whose work I very much admire. I have to live with that choice. I have to be okay with that. It's completely my responsibility. Our talk about being professional creatives is often so light and frivolous, but these decisions have real world consequences - for agencies, for their clients, for people in our industry, for people affected by the work we do, for the people affected by what we are promoting, and, finally, for me - sitting here at my desk early on a cold Monday morning.

What responsibility do we have for choosing livelihoods that are fundamentally unstable? All of it. That's how much. I fell into this line of work in my mid-20s after years of working at grocery stores and call centers. I had no other good options, really. And I've grown to love this good option. It's my life. It fills me with immense satisfaction. And at 30, with 6 years of this behind me, I don't have many other options that aren't minimum wage. And I have to be ok with that choice. With my choice.

So why am I writing a post about this? Because I really appreciate when others are honest. Because it's rarely talked about by working professionals. With few exceptions, people just don't write about this. There is so much faking-it-till-you-make-it, so much swagger. And it makes people like me complicit in promoting this view of my job as one that is easy, carefree and sunny. The idea that once you hit a certain point, whatever that point may be, that everything will be ok from then on. But that's not the truth. It never has been. If you want to do this for a living, you have to fight, HARD. You have to do the best work you possibly can and hold on to good clients. You have to promote yourself and be a smart businessperson. You have to deal with feeling anxious a lot of the time, and the temptation to second-guess yourself constantly. You have to always be moving, like a caffeine-fueled shark. You have to support those around you. You have to make choices that will help not only yourself, but others. Because many times YOU are one of the others. I needed to write a post about this because it's the flipside to my other posts about creative ethics. Hard times are part of this life.

And so here I sit this morning. I'm annoyed at how sunny it is. I've been up all night working on a project I'm really excited about for a great client. After that project is done, I don't know what's going to happen. Do we ever really know? I have a choice to make about what I'm going to do today. But really, I've already made that choice. I made it 2 1/2 years ago when I was laid off from my studio job. Instead of getting a job at a the grocery store, I went home and started making things. And I made it again this morning.

So here is what my day is going to look like:

Firstly, I'm going to post this on my blog. Then I'm going to post the link on Twitter and my Facebook page, as I always do. Then I'm going to send out a Tweet that I'm looking for work. Then I'm going to go to sleep for a few hours. When I wake up, I'm going to spend a few hours finishing up an animatic for a client, write some notes and send it off. And then I'm going to start work on one of a dozen different ideas I've come up with this weekend to address this dry season in which I find myself. I'm going to make things, and make them well enough that I can make a living doing so. That's the job. That's the choice. It may work, it may not. But you either keep going or you don't. You fight or you quit. And either one is a choice you have to live with.

Good lord, that was a bit heavy handed. Enjoy this doodle of a cat playing guitar:

What song do you imagine he's meowing along to?

PS - It should go without saying that I'm looking for clients right now. My day rates are very average and I have been known to give bands and nonprofits some very attractive package deals. I'm open for commercials, PSAs, music videos, odd commissions, illustrations, etc. I'll even email you some homemade vichyssoise when the technology becomes available.

UPDATE: A commenter named Blake took the time to hash out how $1,000 for a 4 week job would break down as far as an hourly rate. Obviously there are a lot of variables that differ on each job, but it's a pretty eye-opening read if you're not used to thinking about projects this way. Fun exercise: break down a $2,000 4-week project, or a $2,500 6-week project, etc. See how the rates hammer out. I didn't want to write an entire new post about the subject, but you really should go check it out in the comments section. Thanks, Blake! You could have written this entire post in a more informative manner in half the space.

What I learned in 2011 and need to remember in 2012

2012-01-02T05:51:00.001-05:00

I have no new artwork to show you today. I've been working pretty hard when not out holiday-ing this past month, but I can only show you so many images of the new short before I risk spoiling it. I'm so excited about it/overwhelmed by it/terrified of how much work there is left to do on it. So from here on out I won't be talking about Potential very much. It'll still be a few months, depending on my workload from clients. But I'll have plenty of other things to show you before then and plenty of other things to write about.

Here's the last mysterious Potential pic for awhile. SAVOR IT.

Anyway.

So 2011 was a big year, and I learned a lot. Or at least I identified a bunch of things I think are wise and I am trying to remember to remind myself of them as I go into the future. As a public service, I provide a few of them to you here.

1. There seems to be some sort of law of inverse proportionality between talking about being creative and doing actual creative work. For every really good artist there are 12 people ready to charge you for the secrets of being a good artist. Always pick the free advice over the paywalled advice.

2. A lot of people write me asking for career path advice. I think this would happen a lot less if people saw my bank account and my health plan (sleep, fluids, liquid skin, NyQuil). My areas of interest are in the philosophical and ethical issues of being a thoughtful, creative person and the process of making thoughtful, creative work. I'm definitely not a career counselor and in fact there are times when I could probably use one myself. I DO really enjoy answering these questions, though I may have to put up an FAQ to handle some of the repeated ones. That said, I feel like I should mention that there is no such thing as a sure-fire career path in animation/illustration/artsy stuff. Everyone's career is different and there is no such thing as a guaranteed formula for success.

3. Actually, that's a lie. Here is the formula for any and all success I've had:

Try to do really good work. Show it to people. Be a nice guy. Get involved in the community of artists. Make your really good work readily available to people who might pay you to do what you do. Hit deadlines and be friendly and open with your clients. Do more really good work. Repeat until you are able to pay rent and buy groceries regularly. BOOM! YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL CREATIVE PERSON!

4. There is another part of this whole business that people rarely talk about: you have to be lucky sometimes. There isn't anyone still working that doesn't have a story about being in the right place at the right time. We don't earn everything. A lot is given to us and a lot just falls in our lap because we happened to be the closest dancing partner when the music started. That said, doing really good work and being really nice will manufacture plenty of luck on its own.

5. Aesthetics are not really important. With apologies to some wonderful people, I have met hundreds of folks who go out of their way to hit the current cultural norm of a "creative person". They buy only Apple products. They will only take notes in a Moleskine. They spend a lot of time and money hanging out at coffee shops. For some reason they all started wearing glasses over the past few years, to the horror of those of us who have actual visual impairments. There isn't anything wrong with any of these things (except the fake glasses part. Stop it. Some of use earned our glasses through years of near-sightedness, double-vision and headaches. We were picked on in school! You spit on our hardships!). What was I saying? Oh yes. There's nothing wrong with any of these things. Apple seems to make some products that a lot of people really like. Moleskine makes a fine notepad. Caffeine is the lifeblood of the modern creative and coffee is a great way to get it into you. But none of these things will make you a creative person. I read a great article last year that I can't find now that talked about this, so forgive some paraphrasing. People read that this or that artist wrote early in the morning, before the day began. So they do that, hoping that they will be as brilliant as that artist. Or they read that some artist did a lot of drugs, drank a lot and was a total dick to everyone around him. You know what I'm talking about. You've either done this or have know someone who has. The article had this great turn of phrase, something like "This isn't creativity, this is merely rearranging the aesthetics of creativity". So true. A creative earns that name by creating, by producing. Not by consuming a lifestyle and talking about being creative. I'm going to say it again: Creatives make things. Full stop. Creatives ADD things to the world.

6. Aesthetics are really important. So once you're actually making things and all that, you should probably take the time to organize your workspace, figure out your optimum schedule and best practices, secure a steady supply of caffeine, invest in some good and reliable materials, take a shower, comb your hair and put on real pants. Maybe wear a buttoned-down shirt and sweater when you work at home. Shine your shoes. This helps you to feel less like an unemployed person and more like a freelance artist who is totally getting shit done. Look at your organized desk! You're not just someone who makes things - you're someone who makes things at an organized desk! You're someone who wears pants and smells nice! You keep a regular schedule! Is that some coffee? Go ahead - you're a real-life artist! Drink that mess down and get back to your job, which is being fucking fantastic at making fucking fantastic shit. Can you believe that it's actually your job to do this? I can. Because you look and feel like someone who's thriving. And there will be times when you need that to keep you going. Is there any group of people more insecure than freelance creatives? Don't do that insecurity any favors. Stay on top of things, find what works for you and take care of yourself.

That last one is the one I really have to work on. I've talked about my struggles with depression on this blog many times, and it's still something that dogs my entire life and sometimes wreaks havoc with my creative output. It also makes me not want to organize my desk or comb my hair or wear proper pants. My desk is a shattered hellscape affront to heaven itself right now. Staying on top of things is simultaneously one of the hardest things in my life and one one of the things that makes me feel better the most.

So here we are, at the start of another trip around the sun together. I'm thankful to be where I am in my life right now. There is some hard work ahead this year and some changes that need to happen, but I think we can get through it together. I definitely need to say thanks to all of you who follow my work, write me, follow me on Twitter or Facebook, Like my stuff and leave comments on Vimeo, blog/tweet/tell your friends about my stuff, etc. It means a lot to me and I honestly couldn't do what I do without you guys. So thanks! I can promise some big things this year. Let's make a deal - if you keep showing up, I'll keep making stuff and writing. Does that work? I hope so. Let's do this.

Potential WIP #6

2011-12-27T02:47:00.000-05:00

Back to work. This short is officially the longest haul I have ever long-hauled.

Posterity

2011-12-16T16:56:00.000-05:00

I was honored to be asked by the good folks at The Mill to participate in Posterity, a collection of limited-edition prints by artists to benefit those affected by the truly horrific famine in East Africa. There are some really amazing prints available done by artists far more talented and skilled than I.

My print is available here.

I HAVE MADE A MIXTAPE FOR YOU.

2011-12-14T03:23:00.000-05:00

I MADE A MIXTAPE FOR YOU, just in time for holiday traveling. I did it because I like you.

Download it here.

It will be available for as long as Mediafire decides. So grab it now.

And then you can rock out. Also, you can judge my music taste, but I can spoil the ending for you: MY TASTE IS FANTASTIC. I also drew a fun cover for it while watching shit get real on Boardwalk Empire. Enjoy!

I had initially written a long post detailing my thoughts on every song. Yes. I did that. But then I thought "Hey, that's a little weird and obsessive. I should delete that". And so I did. Now you'll simply have to enjoy the tracks completely without context. I'm sure you'll make it through. I have faith in you.

Indecent Exposure

2011-12-07T04:23:00.001-05:00

Exposure as payment. Lord have mercy.

If you're a freelancer in a creative industry, you doubtless have repeatedly gone over this same song and dance. In fact, it's such a played out topic that it seems just as stale to rehash it again. But I've been giving the issue some thought tonight, and want to explore the concept of "exposure" as currency a bit more closely.

Warning: I am about to use the word "exposure" so many times that it will cease to have any meaning to you.

The case that inspired this post, scrubbed of all identifying info:

A client approached me to animate a video for a well-known band. It would involve several weeks/months of full-time work for $500. The client pointed to the fact that the last animator who worked with him did it for this amount, and now that person was receiving a great deal of exposure. When my producer declined (with my approval), the client then emailed me directly. In this email, he mentioned that the producer had possibly declined because he was only interested in the short-term benefits of monetary payment, whereas I might be more enlightened - preferring the "long-term benefits of exposure".

Let's break down what's happening here. A client wants me to make something for them. In return, he is primarily offering exposure. That is, once I complete this project to their specifications, I will have the opportunity to have it viewed by many people. Now, in some ideal world, what does that mean?

Ideally, exposure will bring you new "fans" (I'm still weird about that word)- Twitter followers, Vimeo contacts/likes, readers of your blog and followers of your future work. This last one is extremely important for independent artists. I've been fortunate enough in the past couple of years that my work has garnered a tiny audience, moving me from "unknown guy in his apartment" to "marginally appreciated artist in his apartment". I couldn't have done this without exposure. I post my work to different sites, send emails to people I think might like it, keep my blogging and twittering regular, and participate in a larger online community of artists, animators and designers. I also do one more important thing, but we'll come back to that. Now, I don't do all of these things just to gain exposure. My online colleagues are very valuable to me. They provide me with inspiration, criticism, camaraderie and an ever-increasing standard to compete with (in a friendly way, of course). No one creates in a vacuum, and I am pleased to know some wonderful and talented people online. Beyond that, I very much enjoy talking to people and helping out other independent artists (or aspiring ones) when I can. It's quite fulfilling. But a happy offshoot of this is also the fact that I can now reasonably expect that the next time I put out a big new project, at least a few people online will take notice. And that is gratifying.

Of course this is how every artist survives online. Because among those people who take notice will be a small number of clients (or customers, depending upon your business). And these are the people that enable people like me to keep making things. I very much need to pay bills, and when I'm done with a project and don't have another on the horizon, there is a very real gnawing in my stomach. There is this creeping dread that I will never find another project. I sometimes lay awake at night afraid that I will have to go back to working 50 hours a week at the grocery store. Not that working at the grocery store is "below me" or anything to be ashamed about, but it would mean giving up my livelihood, my art, and my life as I know it. This fear is common among freelancers. I've never met one who doesn't think this way at some point or another. Thankfully, I worry about this less than I used to but it is always there, lurking somewhere in the distance. This is why clients are so sought after: they pay money, which in turn pays bills and buys food, which means I don't have to go back to work at the service desk at Giant Eagle. The checks I get from clients mean I can go on animating, drawing, writing and otherwise creating for a living. They mean survival.

And so when a client offers exposure as payment, I get this little twinge of proletariat rage. If you're a client, take note: offering exposure in lieu of payment is simply promising that, someday, someone will pay the artist to do what you want him or her to do now for free. If you're a freelancer, take note: in a very real sense, this enables the client to directly profit while leaving you to fend for yourself, waiting for another client to treat you like a professional. You can see why this is so attractive to some clients, and why spec work and crowdsourcing are so ubiquitous and maligned. It enables a buyer's market of obscene proportions. The deck is now so tilted against the sellers (the actual workers in this scenario) that many will forgo any payment, just as long as they receive exposure. If they could only get some exposure, then maybe someone will pay them. Maybe they can still have a career. If only they just do this one project for free, they'll cross some magic line and start receiving calls from clients who are only too happy to pay them. But this doesn't work, because the word is out: freelancers will work for free. And if you're a known artist, have no doubt that clients will use your name on the next kid. "Oh, you need to charge a day rate for this? Well, you should know that so-and-so did our last one and they were perfectly happy..." I might laugh at such a statement, but I'm not a hungry kid fresh out of the Art Institute with nothing but a diploma and portfolio full of assignments. Your name means something. And the more of us that succumb to the insecurity that comes with the freelance territory, the more insecure we make it for ourselves and the people coming after us. You may not care about that. I do.

It's been said before, but I'll say it again: You cannot eat exposure, nor pay your rent with it, nor buy health insurance with it, nor put it in an exposure bank for a rainy day. You need money for all of that. That is the trade - you trade your time and work for the client's money. You both need something from the other. Exposure can be a byproduct of this transaction, but it should NEVER be the basis for it.

There's an added bit of absurdity here, and this is primarily what I've been thinking about over the past couple of days. So let's say you want to get your hands on some exposure. Since when is exposure a finite resource that must be earned from clients? I imagine this comes from a time decades gone, where play on television or coverage in magazines and trade annuals were the biggest ways to "make it". But this is the age of THE INTERNET. And in the age of the internet, exposure is a currency that can minted by the artist. And this brings me back to the most important thing one can do to gain exposure, and the thing that I spend so much of my time working my hardest on: making really good work.

The client that started this whole post off mentioned that the artist who did the previous video was getting a lot of great exposure. Implied in this was the idea that the exposure was due to the client. This is true in part, because of the band the video was for. But this alone isn't the kind of exposure the artist needs. Thousands of fans will watch the video regardless of its quality. But very few clients are going to contact this artist for paying jobs simply because he made a crappy video for a known band. This is not exposure an artist can use. No, the video is going to be valuable for this artist because they did a FANTASTIC JOB on it. This will cause future clients to notice, and call with paying jobs that will enable this artist to keep going. It was not the band name that will primarily help the artist - it's the quality of the work. And that type of exposure, the best kind, cannot be given by a client, paying or not. If you want to garner some exposure that is actually useful, you have one reliable method available to you: DO EXCELLENT WORK. Your excellent work can then be shown to the massive and very responsive online community through any number of channels. If it's great work, it will be reblogged, retweeted, embedded and emailed. This will help to bring you work from clients who respect you enough to pay you as a professional, as an artist, as a worker. Of course, this puts a great deal of pressure upon you to do good work, but that's the kind of pressure you should be under. That's the pressure that makes you better, instead of making you desperate. The more work you do for low/no pay, the less secure your job will be. You will be spending your time banging out work for clients who won't compensate you properly. You'll fill up that portfolio, sure, but you had better be doing something else to pay the bills.

So you might be thinking that this all sounds very mercenary. "Scott," you may be saying out loud right now, "so this is all about the money for you?" By no means. I lower my rates for bands and cool people sometimes. I donate a good deal of work to causes I believe in. I help out friends. And of course I make a ton of things just because I love making things. But all of that is done because I want to do it. When I give something to someone because I want to help, that is being charitable. When a client wants me to give something to them so that they can profit off of it, that's not charity at all. And when they recognize the inherent insecurity of the freelance life and wave "exposure" around above my head, that's an attempt at exploitation. As always, Jess Hische says it better and more beautifully than I could. Bookmark that site or or buy the print and hang it over your desk until you know it by heart.

"BUT SCOTT!" you cry "who are you to tell ME what to do?" No one, that's who. I learned about everything I just wrote through making my own mistakes. If you are going to work for no money, I certainly won't stop you. But please make sure you aren't making the decision out of fear, or out of some delusional notion that this is the path to paying work. And remember that these clients aren't going to suddenly decide that your work is worth paying for. After all, they can always move on to the next person, and the cycle will begin again. In fact, the client referenced at the beginning of the post informed me that they immediately found another animator to do the job I turned down. There is always another crowd to be sourced. We have taught them that this is how we will do business. It will keep going for you personally until you stop it, and it will keep going in general until we stop it.

"SCOTT! SCOTT!" you scream "WON'T THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKET JUST SORT THIS OUT IF EVERYONE MINDS THEIR OWN BUSINESS?" Why would it? Really, I would love someone to explain to me how this would work. The exposure-as-payment scam takes the labor of artists and converts it into profit for the client, without returning any profit to the artists. The money flows upward. It's work for the promise that someone else will eventually pay. There's no market forces to work with here. One party has all the power because the other party has decided to do whatever the first party says to do. It's the guy selling magic beans in a market. Sure, once in a blue moon a bean grows a beanstalk atop which sits a golden goose or a singing harp or whatever the hell. But the overwhelming majority of the time you end up back at the farm. With no cow. Because you traded it for beans. Which was stupid.

"SCOOOOOOTT!" you shriek "BUT I NEED EXPOSURE AND HAVE LOTS OF TIME BECAUSE I STOPPED DOING WORK FOR CLIENTS WHO DON'T PAY ME! WHAT DO I DOOOOO?" Firstly, calm down. We're almost at the end here, and here is where it gets better. Take a deep breath. Ok, so remember how I said that the biggest key to exposure was doing good work and sharing it online? Well, start doing that. Make something great and show it to others. Really, that's how you get started. But it means you have to be good at what you do. Good enough to make the rest of us go "Holy crap, did you see that? I need to see it again and then show it to some friends!" Get to know other artists who will give you good feedback, criticism and occasionally promotion. I know I promote my online colleagues quite a bit, and am super thankful when others do so for me. I've gotten several jobs from other people having tipped me to them or tipped clients to me. Almost all of my work now comes from clients who saw my work online and emailed me. I do some applying as well, but it's all built around things I made when no one was paying me. Things I made for myself, or for a friend, or for something I cared about. Want to do a commercial or PSA? Make one. Donate a spot to a charity or cause you believe in that would never think of contracting a spot because they're so busy spending all possible funds on doing something awesome for the world. Offer to those who wouldn't ask. There is no shortage of worthy concepts waiting to be promoted by savvy communicators and artists. Want to do something more complicated? Get together with some people and collaborate on a project. Really want to make a music video? Then make one. No one is stopping you. If it's a self-initiated project, it'll be all the better a platform to show how boundless your creativity and ingenuity can be. Do a good enough job and this will garner you EXPOSURE. I'll personally email you to congratulate you on a job well done. We'll all see your skills, your ideas, and your crazy talent. And so will clients. CLIENTS THAT PAY ACTUAL MONEY. And so will clients that pay in exposure. They will email you, but you can ignore them. Or, if you're feeling saucy, you can write them a polite note explaining your position and telling them, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off.

PS - WASN'T THE TITLE OF THIS POST HILARIOUS? IT WAS.

The Squidtivity

2011-12-04T14:30:00.001-05:00

The Squidtivity - AVAILABLE NOW!

My wife works in the same room as me. Our desks face opposite walls and the cat sleeps in between us. When we want to collaborate on something, we just turn our chairs around. The cat keeps on sleeping.

For a half-decade now, my wife has been making handmade plush squid. No machines are involved - it's all cut, embroidered and sewn by hand. Every holiday season, she rolls out the annual Squidtivity set. I remember the first year she made it, both of us worried that no one in their right minds would buy one. We were very, very wrong. The response we get every year is incredible, ranging from audible delight to absolute horror. Atheists love it. Devout believers love it (most of the time). Unaffiliated fans of squid love it. It certainly makes shows interesting.

I tend to do the design-related work for her business. If you ever see us at a show, you'll get a look at the tags and copious amount of signs I've made over the years. This year we thought we should do something to more widely introduce the internet masses to the wonder that is The Squidtivity. A couple late nights later, and this video was born.

Check out Bethany's shop here, and her blog here. Both come highly recommended, and I am nothing if not impartial.

I should mention that the music in this video is a from an album that gets a lot of play around here during the season. It's a dirgey collection of carols played by a creaky old organ and chimes. It's credited to "Godfrey Malcom & Federico". I got it years ago from one of those blogs that rips obscure, ancient vinyl to mp3s. I love how terrible the sound quality is and how out of tune it gets at times. And not for irony - I actually really like it. It has this wonderful sense of atmosphere about it.

I accidentally made a christmas wallpaper.

2011-12-01T05:00:00.001-05:00

Rudolph leads the procession of reindeer through the darkness and fog.

This was almost a print. Now it's a wallpaper. Funny how that happens.
I hate how Blogger shrinks images. It looks much nicer up close and non-fuzzy.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL-SIZED WALLPAPER HERE.

Prints, illustrations, and other subjects.

2011-11-26T04:33:00.001-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you many new prints and cards! This is basically a massive illustration post with a sales pitch built in. Enjoy! All of these are available at my shop here. Onward!

So I made a set of 4 cards for the holidays featuring traditional Christmas-related creatures that I find fascinating. And this isn't in an "aren't non-Americans crazy?" way. I have a long-standing fascination with folklore, specifically as it interacts with religious tradition. As such, this particular subject matter was a gold mine for me. I spent almost as much time reading about these monsters as I did drawing them. If you are unfamiliar with any of them, I would highly recommend popping open a new tab and looking them up. First, and most obviously, The Krampus.

This here is Gryla, who hails from Iceland. Guard your children!

This is the Tio De Nadal from Catalonia, among other places. Stop what you are doing right now and go read about him. You will thank me.

And finally we have a stately Yule Goat from northern Europe. The whole set is available here!

And now, on to the big prints. I'm actually somewhat happy with these!

Boo to anti-intellectualism! Hooray for readers!

This is an update of an old print I did years ago. It was fun reinterpreting a piece from the distant past. You can grab the new one here!

Hey! More animals!

What a year it has been, politically and socially. From Wisconsin to the Middle East and back to New York and beyond, it's been both terrifying and inspiring. We're all trying in our own messy, imperfect ways to make things better.

A portion of each sale of this print will be going to a pro-democracy nonprofit. We haven't decided which one yet, though it will most likely be one focused issues involving money and politics in America. Here's to a new year with more progress and less violence. The print is available here.

I'm really iffy about selling fanart. I definitely appreciate it and love seeing what others do, but I don't think I could bring myself to actually sell art based on someone else's thing, unless it was like a piece of classic literature, film, or music. That said, games are obviously a big pastime for me, and so we have this piece inspired by my time playing Skyrim and Dark Souls, particularly the Tomb of The Giants area in the latter.

My god, that area. I'm fascinated by it, as seems to be my reaction to most things that TERRIFY ME.

It always seems like there's something unspeakably horrible going on underground in every fantasy world. It also seems like there's always awesome treasure at the end of it, just past the worst part of the unspeakable horror. I really had fun doing this one. It reminded me of drawing on my notebooks back in middle school, dreaming of designing my own game. Rest assured I'll be making more games-inspired prints in the future. But probably no fanart. At least none to sell. The big print is available here.

I posted an unfinished version of this a few weeks ago and it got a lot of reblogs and chatter, so I hope people like the finished version!

It features a wonderful quote from the late, great Carl Sagan: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known". Right on, Carl. The print is available here.

Here ends the illustration portion of the post. I hope you dug it! I'm pretty much done with designing new prints for awhile. I figure the shop is stocked enough for the moment and I can turn my attention elsewhere. It's just straight animating from here until spring most likely. I think you'll like what I have cooking.

On a related note:

It seems like everyone has had a pretty bad year financially. Especially for those of us who are self-employed or own small businesses, things are extremely tight right now. I've seen many artists and makers make statements like this already, so I'll just add my voice to the chorus. If you really want to boost the economy, help out people whose work you've enjoyed, and change culture, you can do one simple thing: support artists, makers and small business owners this holiday season. Everyone always complains that America used to make things and now we all just buy mass-produced, cheap stuff we don't really care about. Well, there are a lot of us who are still making things in our small apartments, studios and storefronts. We would like nothing more than to make something for you. I'm not against bigger businesses or anything, but this year skip a trip to Target or Best Buy if you can and shop small and independent. Thanks, from all of us!

ALSO: CARDS!

2011-11-22T03:54:00.001-05:00

NOT SANTA: The last set of cards you'll ever need.

Available this Saturday.

It's not the most sophisticated critique, but you get the idea.

2011-11-22T03:20:00.001-05:00

This time of year always sends me back to Dickens. Dickens is to me what Austen is to my wife.

New prints coming next weekend. Also: cards!

2011-11-18T19:13:00.001-05:00

Here is a small snippet of a large print that will be out next Saturday, just in time for your holiday shopping needs. I promise several new prints as well as original cards for this blessed time. And then I'm going to write a big blog post about why you really should support independent artists and small businesses, especially during this time of the year (as if you don't already know that). These things are all going to happen. I have foreseen it.

And now, back to Skyrim...

Gamers With Jobs

2011-11-15T16:22:00.001-05:00

Like most people my age, I grew up with video games. They have been just as important in my life as books and movies. Granted, I experience all of these mediums differently and get something different from each. But video games have, since christmas of 1989 when I received my NES, been a big part of my time on earth.

That said, I really hate video game culture. The fanboyishness, the misogyny, the homophobia, the glorification of terrible stories and writing, the uncomfortable dual obsession with victimized nerds and sweaty caricatures of masculinity. I have never in my life understood the silly shame that people often have when it comes to being gamers, but I completely understand revulsion at the culture that so often surrounds the art form and hobby.

Gamers with Jobs is an oasis. It's the only game community to which I belong and in which I participate. It's full of people, mostly adults, who want to get together and have reasonable, thoughtful discussions about games, gaming, and life in general. Their podcast is second to none and the front page features some of the best writing about games available anywhere. I can't recommend it enough. It's gaming culture I can get behind.

Every year some people in the community get together a charity drive for the wonderful organization Child's Play. This year they asked me if I would donate a poster design for it. Of course I agreed, and that is the design you see up top. It's available for order here. It's 14 x 20 and $20 (shipping included), which is a great deal for a big, colorful print. I'm not doing the printing or shipping, but from what I understand they are taking orders now and it will be shipped in mid-december in one big batch. All of the profits are going to Child's Play, so consider it a donation to a fantastic cause that just happens to get you a sweet print. And not to be too sappy, but this is a great time of year to splurge a little on giving.

And I'll say it again, GWJ is fantastic. If you're interested in a mature, intelligent community of non-abusive adults to discuss and play games with, check it out! I'll see you there.

Oh, and you don't have to be involved with GWJ to enjoy this print. If you're a gamer with a job/looking for a job/just had a job and got laid off and enjoying receiving unemployment, this print is for you.

I had a good run as a productive human being.

2011-11-11T01:19:00.001-05:00

But that is all over now.

The Black Dog and I

2011-11-06T18:24:00.001-05:00

Potential WIP #5

2011-11-03T06:55:00.002-05:00

Back on track with this. Cool things are happening.

After this short is done, I think my brain will be completely void of ideas.

A radical idea for nonradical creatives.

2011-11-02T04:27:00.000-05:00

Forgive the momentary dip into things political and current events-ish. I promise it won't happen often.

Integrity is unpopular.

If you have ethical qualms about doing something, you will always have people saying "Yeah, if you could get away with it you'd do the same thing". If you then point out that you have had the opportunity and still held to your convictions, you will have those same people telling you that you're a sucker, or that you only did it to somehow prove that you are better than others. There are some people whose only goal is to get paid. Unfortunately, that means that their only goal is to get paid. If you're like most people, you don't want to judge anyone. You don't want to say "what you are doing is wrong". But sometimes you come up against this incredibly cynical, mercenary thought process and you don't know what else to call it but a really crappy attitude.

For some this is honestly just nihilism. For others it's a defense mechanism. And certainly there are people who do things simply to have others praise them for their goodness. But there are lots of people out doing good things not because they want to prove something or make others look bad, but because they just give a shit.

Giving a shit is also unpopular.

I think about this on a day like today, when some people are striking for a lot of reasons. You may support some of those reasons and want to participate. You may support those reasons but be against striking or protesting or whatever other tactics others may use. You may be interested in the ideas but uninterested in a specific movement. Or you may be all for it but interested in something a bit more personal and longer-lasting.

So here's an idea for creatives that are interested in direct action but aren't looking for a Bastille to storm: Don't do work for clients who actively promote ideas or engage in activities you are against. Stick to your ideals and ethics when it comes to the work you will do. Instead of a one-day strike on all business, why not a life-long strike on any work for clients that make the world a worse place? Yes, you might lose money. Yes, it might get awkward. Yes, it's going to look completely different for each person. But if you're really interested in actively making choices about what you do and do not support, then perhaps you should skip that political ad that you feel weird about. Or maybe that spot for the company with the strong ties to that oppressive regime somewhere on the other side of the world. Or maybe that borderline-misogynist ad or music video? Yes, someone else will do the spot instead of you. Perhaps it should be you that does the right thing regardless. Just because you can't fix everything doesn't mean you shouldn't do something.

I've been beating this drum for a long time, but it's a drum that always need to be beaten. Betraying your ideals is not a mark of professionalism. Every decision you make that isn't directly about money will be called idealistic by someone. Integrity is highly underrated in our business.

Beyond that, why not use your skills to actively promote things you support? As creatives, we make culture. That's why people hire us - we can make culture that promotes specific ideas. So in addition to refusing your time and talents to bad ideas, maybe we can work on better utilizing our talents to promote good ones. Protests end. Movements go sour. Candidates disappoint. But ideas live on. If they live long enough and spread far enough, culture changes. And when culture changes, even our imperfect and often unreceptive institutions will follow. We can help make that happen. In fact, it can't happen without us.

Protesting is great. Direct action is awesome. But there needs to be a wider group of people toiling away in a number of ways in order to change anything. The civil rights movement didn't happen just because of speeches and marches. It happened because millions of other people saw what was happening and did their part to help. So write, draw, design, animate, film,whatever. I'm not of the persuasion that such things can change the world on their own in some magical manner. But art and design are communication, and that can change minds, and those minds can change things in the real world. That is practical.

So there's a nonradical idea that can have a radical impact. Simply use your abilities to promote good ideas. Actively refuse to promote bad ones. Go out of your way to support things you believe in. Get involved in the world around you. You're not going to be here long, so do what you can with what you have.

Spaceman in Space

2011-10-29T06:12:00.004-05:00

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" - Carl Sagan

The finished version of this is now available as a print!

Fix More. Give Up Less.

2011-10-26T03:38:00.002-05:00

Complicated does not equal unfixable.

Doing a bunch of drawing to ramp up to some new prints, just in time for the holidays.

SAVE YOUR MONEY.

Maker

2011-10-23T03:22:00.003-05:00

Making things is one of the best things.

Making Things - A long awaited how-to post.

2011-10-22T06:25:00.000-05:00

I have learned something about myself: when it comes to technique, I am a crappy teacher. I am positively awful at imparting any technical knowledge. I just don't really know how to break it down very well. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have no difficulty speaking at length. But when I need to sit down and actually teach someone to do anything, I am hopeless. My wife explains it like this: I would make a fantastic lecturing professor but a terrible hands-on school teacher. I used to think she was just trying to nudge me into another career choice, but now I understand. She is, as usual, correct: Woe unto you if you are relying upon me to impart practical knowledge in a systematic manner.

What does this have to do with you? Well, a month ago I said "Boy, people sure are asking me a lot of questions about The Murf. I should just make a short behind the scenes vid!" And then I went and posted that I was going to do it and the people rejoiced mightily. And then, almost immediately, I suffered some massive hard drive failures that took with them the original project file for The Murf. I spent about a week trying to get it back, to no avail. Someday I will have the money to pay someone to attempt to recover a 2tb hard drive. Today is not that day. So I was left with no project file and a promise I had made to the lovely people of the internet. So I started writing a big long look at my methods and creating a sample project for it. And then I got sidetracked, and then I got busy, and then I didn't really know how to put it together, and I had problems with Camtasia, and then my voice sounded stupid so I kept re-recording the narration, and then I hated the whole thing and wanted to go hide under the bed.

But then I remembered - you know what I AM good at? Writing really long blog posts. So this is going to have to do. I'm going to go over some basic things that go into what I make, focusing mostly on The Murf. And worry not, there will be video as well. I'll be basing this mostly on questions I have received from you, dear internetters, and I will try to keep my answers as brief and clear as possible. I don't really do step-by-step tutorials, but I will try to be as helpful as possible. So feel free to leave questions or comments, or email me directly.

Also, as you can already tell, this will be LONG. Go grab a drink, throw a blanket around your shoulders and settle in.

ONWARD!

HOW DO YOU DO CHARACTER ANIMATION IN AFTER EFFECTS?

There are as many ways of animating in After Effects as there are animators. At the moment there seems to be a move to using some really intense rigging and coding to perform digital puppetry of sorts. I can think of three people off the top of my head who you should be watching if you are interested in going in that direction. One of them is Daniel Gies, who deserves to be a household name among AE animators. The results he attains are so unique and so very much attuned to his style that I am consistently in awe of him. He's one of those artists whose work is completely different from your own, but you look at it, grunt in approval and nod your head. The other two people are, of course, the twin geniuses that comprise Tiny Inventions. If you're reading this blog, you are probably familiar with their work. Their combination of puppetry, hand-made objects, pixilation and After Effects is in a class of its own. It's the best kind of kitchen sink animation. They've earned every bit of success they've attained and, in my opinion, deserve far more.

My approach is markedly different from these kids in a few ways. I use almost no coding and my rigging, if you want to call it that, is very simple. This is mostly because my style itself is very simple and when I am tackling a big issue I normally end up using a dozen simple things as opposed to a complicated, specialized solution. I could make my assets in Photoshop (and I sometimes do), but I've already got After Effects open, and if I do then right in program I save a step, save time, and have a remarkable amount of control when it comes time to animate.

As I've mentioned before, I began animating in Flash. I've always been self-taught. The big monkey-touching-the-monolith moment for my developing animation style came about 2 years in, sometime in 2006 or so. I stumbled across this tutorial thing by a guy named Chris Georgenes. Click here to check it out. It's a bit old, but the principles are still completely valid. The basic idea was that you could, by manipulating 2d layers, add an amazing amount of depth. My method for creating characters in After Effects owes much to his methods, and I couldn't possibly continue without tipping my hat to his work. Speaking of which, before we go on, allow me to be a boring professor type for a minute. As I have evolved my methods to fit my style, so should you. The world is crammed full of people who can reproduce what they see others do. If I had a dime for every reel I've seen which is nothing more than the sum total of the talented Nick Campbell and Andrew Kramer, I'd never have to work again. Take what they do, learn from their crazy skills, and apply it to your own voice. Daniel Gies and Tiny Inventions are amazing partly because they bend their toolset to their will. They have a vision and they use what they learn to accomplish it. Do the same. Reproduction is easy. Individuality is hard.

Ok, so we start with a solid layer. For our purposes, let's make it a square.

I've thrown an Inner Shadow (set to screen) onto it. You can find that under Layer>Layer Styles. It can add a nice subtle bit of dimension and light-wrapping to your character. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes it works out well. You'll find that your eye doesn't actually need much more than a hint in order to "buy" something. Sometimes something subtle can make a very large difference.

Next we'll toss a mask on this thing.

See how simple this is? Now let's add a few more layers and masks.

Ok, so I've added some more features, all made from masked solids, all on separate layers. Even that highlight in the middle of his face is a little solid with the edges of the mask feathered out. Again, it's just a little something to add dimension. If you are somewhat fiddly with your work like I am, working with solids is great because it gives you infinite opportunities to mess with the color and shape of everything. You don't have to commit until you are ready. Already this hairless dude is looking alright. I will name him Steve. Everyone say hello to Steve.

See how Steve's nose is just two masks on a pink solid layer? SIMPLE. And because I've created all of this out of solid layers, the character naturally meshes with all the crazy stuff you can do in After Effects. And of course, that's where the lens flares come in. If I've learned one thing about After Effects tutorials, it is that you must use lens flares if you want anyone to take them seriously.

WE WELCOME YOU IN THIS PLACE, OH DEFAULT LENS FLARES!

As you can see, Steve has embarked on one serious vision quest, one that we onlookers can scarcely comprehend.

And this presents us with a challenge: how do we make this humble collection of solid layers move and register emotion? How do we manipulate these simple shapes to show depth of both the personal and dimensional variety? WITH KEYFRAMES!

So here is a look at all of the keyframes I'll be using, plus how all of it is rigged up. This one is stupidly simple - everything is just parented to layer 9, face base. Of course, things are usually much more complicated. But right now I just want to have him turn his head in three directions. So I set my first few keyframes. Then I move a few frames down the timeline, set a new set of keyframes, and start adjusting masks.

I know what it should look like from this angle, and I just move the layers and adjust the masks to attain the desired shapes. By moving each feature more or less, I can also give the illusion of depth. Objects closer to the viewer move more than objects further away. That's called parallax, and it is very important. Look how far his nose has moved, as opposed to his ears? Notice that Steve's ears have dropped, counterbalancing his upturned face? Notice how his nose slants upward now, as if we are looking at it from below?

Once again, I've just moved layers and changed shapes. I've highlighted the nose masks yet again, as it is the feature that moves and changes the most throughout this sequence. Again note the counterbalancing of the features, as well as their placement. This is how I give the illusion of depth.

And now we hit our final position. Notice that he is now facing in the opposite direction. To give the nose an organic transition, I've gone back and added a keyframe to the middle of the last movement.

Usually I'll need to go back and finesse lots of things. For the purposes of this post, however, this will do. This is how I create the illusion of depth and dimension using only masked solids. It's mostly about know what things should look like at different angles, along with some basic principles of animated movement. From there on, it's just practice and experimentation. Before we leave Steve, let's have a look back at these fleeting moments we've all shared together.

Let's say you want to have your character speak. Some animators swap in different premade mouth shapes as they go. I prefer to do all of them with masks, so that I can smoothly move from shape to shape. There's no right way to do it as long as it works, but that's how I like to do it. It's pretty much the same method I used for Steve's facial features, only this time the shapes are the mouth, the tongue and the teeth. Then I precomp it and make it just another layer sliding around the screen. This can add up to a lot of keyframes, but don't let 'em scare you. Just remind them that THEY WORK FOR YOU.

To see this character talk and learn more about the project, click me!

Of course, this has been a simple and dirty example of one part of a character. Things get complicated very quickly. For example, here is a character rig from one of many unfinished projects.

He's made up completely of masked solids with some simple texture overlays. The textured bits as well as the mouth are precomps. The arm and finger bending is done with the puppet tool. I use the Puppet Tool all over the place. Just about all animation involving limbs uses the Puppet Tool. Sometimes, though, I'll just have some layers parented together like Cap'n Dan's legs here. They'll just swing on their anchor points. It all depends on what you're going for.

As I said before, there isn't one way to do this, so I experiment a lot. Sometimes I'll make some or all of the layers making up a character 3d layers, and use the camera to help add some depth. Sometimes I precomp the entire character and place it in a 3d environment in After Effects. And that will bring us to our next section.

If you're interested in learning something about character animation, I recommend:
The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams
Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair
Character Animaton Crash Course by Eric Goldberg

None of these books has anything to do with After Effects, by the way.

HEY! Get up and get a drink of water! Use the bathroom! You've been reading this for like an hour! I'll wait.

HOW DO YOU MAKE COMPLICATED 3D ENVIRONMENTS IN AFTER EFFECTS?

This section will be considerably shorter than the last, because there isn't much to it and no pictures. I make the assets, often in After Effects but sometimes in another program. I bring them into After Effects, and arrange them. Then I add a camera. VIOLA! Obviously, it gets more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. I use the same basic principles as I used in creating Steve earlier. We're not trying to make real objects that we can film from every angle. We are creating those angles, and creating the illusion of those objects. So let's look at a shot from The Murf that I've received many questions about. I've reexported it with some changes - the elements in the scene will come in one by one, and then the camera will change position. I think that, after looking at it for a bit, you'll understand how it was made. In hindsight, there is a lot there I could optimize and do differently, but I don't think I've made anything that I can't say that about.

You can download an HD mov of this clip HERE. That way you can frame-by-frame it to your heart's content.

Ok, so let's look at this shot. I made it on the fly, just tossing solids and masks down all over the place. I had a thumbnail sketch to work from, but otherwise I just went for it. The canal in the center is just a precomp of the city skyline tinted blue with Wave Warp added. The people are precomps, as are the zeppelins. The cars and streetlights were duplicated using Motion Tile, which is very handy for such things. You can also see one of the few textures I brought in for the project. A little bit of texture goes a long way. You'll notice that much of the depth and size of the scene comes from color. Color tends to lose saturation and become lighter as it recedes into the distance. In real life, this is caused by witches. Do not anger them, lest they steal even more color from the world. When the camera pulls back in the above shot, it is clear how cheap and small the whole setup looks. But remember, we're not out to actually make a city. We just want to fool the viewer for a few seconds. And using some actual depth, some strategic coloration and composition we can convince them that it's a real place (or real enough, anyway). This shot took possibly the longest of any shot in the video, maybe two nights or so. It was snowing very hard and I remember I was watching a very long BBC documentary on the first World War. What a stupid war that was. Not that other wars are awesome or anything, but seriously. I just kept getting angry listening to how it got going. After awhile I turned it off and watched Flapjack instead.

I've also written about making 3d-ish environments in After Effects here, here and here.

As an aside- thanks to whoever it was who wrote me a month ago to ask about the above shot. Had I not exported that clip for you, I would not have it now. It would have went along with the project files in the great hard drive crash of '11.

IF YOU HAVE TO SPEND SO MUCH TIME CHEATING TO CREATE THE ILLUSION OF DEPTH, WHY NOT JUST USE A 3D PROGRAM?

Well, if I ever get the time I would love to become better at Cinema 4d. I'm a novice with it now, but can get things done in a pinch. I'd need a few months to really get to know it and I always seem to have other things that need to be done. That's a bad excuse. Beyond that, I find that my brain works mostly in 2d, or maybe 2.5d. And in the end, the kind of animation I like doesn't look like it's fully 3d. I like a blend, erring more on the 2d side. I like animation that's a little flatter, a little stiffer, and little more imperfect. Even the 3d stuff I like is stopmotion, and I prefer it when it has little blemishes and fingerprints. Show me a beautiful 3d render and I'll admire it for sure. But show me something scrappy, flawed and unique and I'll be intrigued. I'll remember it. I blame it on growing up playing in punk bands. I learned to play power chords and upbeats really, really well. I also learned to sing terribly, but with plenty of heart. I think my animation has evolved along those same lines.

AND NOW, QUICK ANSWERS TO ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS:

HOW DO YOU MAKE PEOPLE WALK?

In After Effects, I use the puppet tool for the legs and arms. The rest is just learning to make a walk cycle. The books listed above or the internet will tell you all you need to know about them.

DUDE, HOW HIGH WERE YOU WHEN YOU MADE THE MURF?

I can't believe I've gotten this question more than once.

Not high at all. I've actually never done anything close to drugs. I don't even drink. Of course, I'm not counting caffeine. I am a Coke Zero addict. Then again, I DID take generic Nyquil this year just to combat insomnia. I did it twice. The first time I took it I suffered a massive fall down some steps and into the street the next afternoon. The second time, I nearly cut my finger off while peeling a potato the next day. Seriously, you should see the scar. Thank god for liquid skin. Let that be a lesson to you, kids.

HOW DID YOU MAKE THE SQUARE FLAMES IN THE MURF?
Particular. Custom particles. Easy as you like. Same with the snowflakes and the comet.

HOW DO YOU GET THE NICE FLICKERY PARTICLES I SEE ALL OVER YOUR WORK?
In Particular, go into the editor for Size Over Life under particle settings. Make it all crazy jagged. Make sure that overall it increases and decreases gradually over the life of the particle. Now set the particle life to 100% random.

WAIT, ARE YOU SAYING THERE IS OR ISN'T A GOD IN THIS VIDEO?
Well, is it a whale or is it a group of stars?

WHAT WAS YOUR LIGHT SETUP FOR THE MURF?

I almost never use AE lights. They slow everything down and I can never get them to look right. All light/atmosphere in The Murf was done with solids and color correction. Here's a hint - a nice wash of glow, especially of you have a bright and colorful sky, will go a long way.

HOW DID YOU MAKE THAT SCENE WITH THE STARS AND THE GRID AND THE FLASHING SQUARES AND STUFF?
You refer to the scene that comes at about the 2:02 mark. I will have to do this from memory, so bear with me.

That scene used 3d layers and a camera. The space clouds were off in the distance. The non-constellation stars were made up of two instances of Trapcode Form. You'll understand why I used two in a moment. The stars making up the constellations were just shape layers, so that I could place them how I wished. The whale and squid were just masked solids of course, lightly animated with the puppet tool. Ok, so they disappear. The grid layer is just a 3d solid layer with grid applied to it. I then duplicated one of the background Trapcode Form star layers, and replaced the star particles with custom particles. That way they matched up with some of the stars and looked like they were labels. I animated them in by tweaking the string settings in Form. Oh, I also used Form in this video because I liked the strings and how they also looked like artificial patterns, which was a running theme. So I then added in some tracking label graphics around the main constellation stars by hand. The camera had been slowly tilting this whole time. A little camera motion can really help add depth to a scene. Even if it's very small, your brain notices it. The rest of the shot is just camera movement, a black solid over the background, and animated solids.

WILL YOU UPLOAD THE PROJECT FILE FOR THE MURF?
No, silly! It's gone forever! And even if I had it, probably not. It's better this way.

I WOULD LIKE TO READ A LOT MORE ABOUT THE MURF, PREFERABLY IN RESPECTED PAPERS OF NOTE.
Please see my interviews with Motionographer and The Atlantic. You should have few questions afterward.

I'VE READ THOSE INTERVIEWS AND UNDERSTAND WHY YOU HAD THAT MOSAIC OVERLAY OVER THE WHOLE VIDEO, BUT HOW DID YOU DO IT?
Again, this is from memory. It was just an adjustment layer with Mosaic, set to Overlay or Soft Light at maybe 10-20% opacity. Something like that.

WAIT, IN THAT VIDEO OF STEVE FROM WAY BACK AT THE BEGINNING - WAS THAT A SNIPPET OF A PRODIGY SONG FROM THE HACKERS MOVIE SOUNDTRACK?
Yes. I still have my techno cds from high school. Incidentally, I'm listening to an Orbital song that was on the soundtracks to both Hackers and Mortal Kombat. Yeah, kids. I'm tumbling off of whatever pedestal onto which you might have placed me.

Alright. I think at this point I've covered the basics of how I make things in After Effects and thoroughly exhausted The Murf as a topic. As always, I will answer what questions I can, so hit me up.

I hope this was somewhat useful to you. As previously stated, I am a crappy teacher. There are probably further steps to everything I do that I don't realize I need to explain. If you need me to write a long essay on a topic, that's fine. If you need me to teach you how to do what I do, WE ARE SCREWED. Thanks again for your correspondence, your enthusiasm, and your support. It means more to me that you know. Keep checking back. More awesome stuff to come in the future!

I AM GOING TO BED NOW. GOOD NIGHT.

-scott

Dark Souls Fanart #1

2011-10-12T04:31:00.002-05:00

Been super busy lately but not on anything I can show. Mostly boring administrative stuff, doing some follow-up stuff for past clients, etc. I promise interesting things very soon, though.

Oh, and I've also been playing the crap out of Dark Souls. My psn handle is Bombsfall, so feel free to look me up. Not that we can actually plan co-op in Dark Souls, but at least we can share our ridiculous experiences with this incredible game.

UPDATE: Hey! I've got a Dark Souls-inspired print up for sale in my shop. It's not fanart per se, but it certainly reflects the scar that The Tomb of The Giants left on my soul. Check it out!

Huff Huff

2011-09-30T13:57:00.000-05:00

A doodle born of video games on the brain.

An exciting frame from an upcoming piece.

2011-09-29T16:49:00.002-05:00

In it, I will be talking briefly about this face. If I can get my client work out of the way today I'll be spending the next few days making it. So stay tuned.

The Work/Life Issue - Addendum

2011-09-26T15:38:00.000-05:00

I wanted to add and reiterate a few things to my recent endless post about my own experiences with overworking/working stupidly. After writing something like that, you inevitably see things you wish you could add. However, I didn't want to increase the already mammoth length of that post. So here we go.

1. There are awesome studios, clients, producers and such out there. A lot of the discussion about working ends up being a worker vs boss fight. I reject such a simplistic narrative as an explanation for everything, though it rings true in specific situations. Bosses are people too. There's a wonderful line by Frank Turner that I think applies whenever you're tempted to talk about how an entire group of people are awful: "There's no such thing as rock stars. There's just people that play music, and some of them are just like us and some of them are dicks". Absolutely 100% true.

2. That said, as much as I will vocally support any studio that takes steps favorable to their workers (go, awesome people, go!), it is first and foremost the responsibility of the worker to make choices. A few weeks ago I had someone contact me with a job that would take weeks and pay very little. Instead of taking the job and then complaining about how unfair the whole thing was, I just said no. I lost some money there. That was the price, in real dollars I could honestly use. And whether I did that or not was my responsibility and my choice. Let's call for better conditions, but also let's take responsibility for ourselves. There is an issue, at least in my country, with people waiting for change to come down from the top. That happens sometimes and is very important, but it is always in response to a massive amount of change from below. And there's a lack of work being done there.

3. This boggles my mind, but there are some people who really like the breakneck, murderous pace of many studios. I want to reiterate to them: Cool. Go for it. I do hold that such practices are harmful for them and the industry as a whole, and many of these constantly-running people will find it hard to keep up that pace as they grow older and are replaced by cheaper and faster youngsters. Or they may find that, while is it super cool to hobnob and work with the biggest clients and most prestigious studios, they might want to spend at least some of their time off the clock, living their lives. But hey, it's their choice. We all have lines drawn over what we will trade to whom, and for what. The issue here isn't whether or not someone should have the freedom to do something. The issue is whether or not it's a good idea. And that, of course, is going to lead to some disagreements and discussions.

4. Also - you can make awesome work on your own, and there are jobs that don't require ridiculous hours for months at a time. Crazy, inhuman demands by an employer do not equal quality. Just because it cost more doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

Going steady

2011-09-26T06:24:00.001-05:00

Hey, check this out!

That's cool, right?

Making Things : The Work/Life Issue

2011-09-24T01:58:00.002-05:00

In honor of the oncoming Halloween season, I want to tell you a horror story. It's a long one, so pull up a chair and settle in.

This was inspired by reading this story at the almighty Motionographer. (edit -I should point out, as I'm getting some traffic now from that post, that this whole diatribe isn't directed at Ash Thorpe. These are just my own thoughts and experiences on the subject. We're all in this together.)

In 2004 I was hired at my first animation job, at a small web startup in Altoona, PA. I know - the big time! I like to joke that neither I nor my bosses knew enough about Flash or animation to know that I had no idea what I was doing. I was playing in a ska band at age 23. My job before this was at a grocery store making $8 an hour. This new job paid little more, but it was an office job where I got to draw. Also, my office mate was a bandmate and great friend of mine. I jumped into it wholeheartedly.

Soon after I began, I was handed 2 things. The first was a video promoting some sketchy supplement that I doubt works. In fact, looking back on it now, the company's main clients were direct-marketing scam companies. I should have been tipped off when my 4 managers all tried to recruit me to buy and sell supplements from them, promising that they'd give me some "prime contacts" that were sure to buy. The video's concept resembled the somewhat obscure animated film Osmosis Jones that had recently been released. I was given a script and I got to work, learning Flash, the ins and outs of a Wacom tablet, and the making of things as I went. In fact, you want to see it? Yeah, you do.

I will warn you: it is hilariously, god-awful terrible. It is a master class in what not to do. I laughed out loud through most of putting this together tonight. I eliminated any mention of the company or their products, because I could totally see them suing me or something. Also, I discovered that doing so made the video about 10x funnier. Even without the product and enzyme names, you can just feel the absolute ridiculous bullshit seeping out of the screen.

The lesson here: stay away from junk science and direct marketing.

The second lesson: Everyone sucks when they are starting out. You will improve with time.

As awful as it is, you must admit that it looks like quite a load on a complete novice. It was. I was swamped. It took me something like 5 or 6 weeks to make it, working 60 hours a week. Yes, you read that correctly. The reason for the long hours was the second thing - the company was launching an internet service, and we were all being asked to work 1/4 more hours (it was a 45 hour work week there normally) in order to get the service out by some trade show somewhere. 6 to 6. We would not be paid for these extra hours, but instead would have shares in the profits that would surely come rolling in. The math was this - there's a lot of people on the internet, and we only need like 1% of them to sign up for us all to be super rich. In my 23 year old head, that made sense. I was also dirt poor and was planning on proposing to my then girlfriend/now wife. I needed money and thought to myself that I was being very responsible, sacrificing now for gain in the years ahead.

I was also homeless at the time. I was crashing at a bandmate's house or my girlfriend's apartment and living out of my tiny red car. Bethany lived 90 minutes away from my work, and my bandmate lived 45 minutes away. I was doing a lot of driving. A typical day saw me wake up at Bethany's apartment at 4am, and drive to work. I would show up around 8 that evening. We'd hang out and then I'd be asleep by 10 or 11. Rinse and repeat. Staying at my bandmate's house was a little better, but not much. I slept in my car some nights. I barely remember that summer and fall. The road I had to take was a potentially treacherous highway through the mountains of Western PA. I was so exhausted all of the time that I would be honestly half awake, desperate to get to a bed or couch. I got a ticket for going 95 miles an hour down a mountain. It was expensive. To be honest, I was half asleep, the sun in my eyes. To this day I can't say how I didn't die that year. I gained a lot of weight, mostly from junk food and coffee. I started getting light-headed and seeing lights. I developed an ulcer that still bothers me from time to time. I got several more tickets and had some near misses when I fell asleep at the wheel. It was the worst time of my life, hands down. I lost the better part of a year and nearly killed myself, and for what?

Incidentally, that studio closed down the next year due to massive errors on the part of the managers and owners. But that's another, more bizarre and entertaining story. Ask me sometime.

Years later I made a similar mistake at my next studio job. Again, I was afraid of being broke and of losing the job before I had it. The first day there I was asked to stay late. I did. And I did it for the next 3 weeks. I worked every day of the next month, including weekends. I worked 48 hour shifts with no sleep. I was exhausted. I gained more weight. I began to get migraines. My bosses kept telling me that this is how it is in "the industry". And while I knew that they were full of shit, I was afraid. So I kept going. Eventually I had an emotional breakdown during my 40 minute commute home and almost wrapped my car around another guardrail. I kept telling myself that things would calm down, that the requests for extensive overtime would pass. They did not. And so I finally told them that I wouldn't be staying late anymore. Such talk was initially rebuffed, until I started leaving at 6 when my day officially ended. I started giving project estimates that matched actual work days. I started being a bit firmer about it. And you know what? Other employees started doing the same. And the bosses learned.

Incidentally, that studio also closed down the next year due to massive errors on the part of the managers and owners. But that's yet another, more bizarre and entertaining story. Ask me sometime.

In early 2010 I was doing a freelance gig at a local studio. Nice place, treated me wonderfully and paid well. It was across the river in Downtown Pittsburgh, which is an expensive nightmare for parking. I thought it would be a good idea to just make the 45 minute walk instead of driving. The first week was great, and then the requests to stay late began. And I complied. I was worried about our finances, and I knew that I needed a new computer as my trusty workstation was dying. If I just powered through, I could take care of bills and still afford a new computer. I worked on the project for 20 days. In the final week, I slept 2 hours a night on the studio couch and stayed up all night the final 2 days. My wife walked down to meet me for a nice spring walk home on the final afternoon. I was in the overdriven underslept hyper mode you get into when you are extremely fatigued. We began our walk home and everything was going fine until about the halfway mark, when we began to cross the 10th Street Bridge. From this point on I have no memory aside from a sudden splitting headache and some hazy visions of lights. Everything that happened afterward I have from my wife's account. I stopped walking on the bridge and stared at the water, forgetting where I was. Bethany took my hand and guided me a long. When we had to cross a busy street during rush hour, I apparently began to walk into traffic, saying that I could just walk down the yellow line between the cars. Bethany ran out and pulled me back. Later, I stopped at a building and began talking about the pigeons on the roof (they are my favorite bird) before walking off of the curb again. When we reached our apartment, I forgot where I was and what I was doing again and she had to convince me that this was indeed my house and I had to walk upstairs. I complained that I was too tired and really needed to go to bed. She finally got me upstairs and into bed, where I awoke 16 hours or so later.

I was pretty sick for about a week after that. When I was feeling better, we went for a walk around the neighborhood for some fresh air. I stopped by Commonwealth Press to see my friend Dan. He told me that I looked awful and asked what was going on. I told him about my ordeal at the freelance gig. I told him how it was terrible that they asked me to work so many hours and how hard and unfair it was. Dan just looked at me and said "Well, why didn't you just tell them no? Isn't it your responsibility to set those boundaries?". He has a talent for being direct. I sputtered. I had expected sympathy. I was kind of annoyed, to be honest. But he was right. I had all of the control in the situation. I chose to work those hours. I chose not to negotiate better terms or a more realistic timeline for the project. When it got out of control, I shouldered all of it and it nearly killed me, or at least nearly did me great harm. Dan was right.

In the end, I can tell you stories about terrible clients, horrible bosses and awful jobs. I have endless stories you wouldn't believe. Really. Just insane people. But I agreed to their unreasonable demands. I did it because I was afraid- afraid of being broke, afraid that they'd replace me, afraid that I wasn't good enough to warrant guidelines, afraid I would get some sort of reputation for being difficult, afraid of letting people down. It's that fear that makes people shells of themselves by 30. It's that fear that kills young, creative people with car accidents and heart attacks. It's the same fear that keeps workers the world over in terrible conditions.

It's true that in a lot of work situations, especially ones as fluid and user-unfriendly as those in the creative industries, you really have no control. There are clients who will ask or flat-out demand that you do ridiculous things. And if you refuse, there is a line of hungry people behind you ready to do those things. In those situations, you have to take control. You have to be willing to walk away. You have to be willing to say no. No one can make you do anything. That sounds silly, but it's true. You decide to work in the conditions in which you work. You're not a sweatshop worker in a 3rd world country with no other sources of income. You really aren't. You are not trapped. You have the ability to choose, to improvise, to be flexible, to say no.

Another downside to doing ridiculous, self-harmful things for clients is that over time it teaches them that this is normal. We see this all the time in creative industries. Why pay someone a living wage if you can pay a recent grad peanuts, knowing that if they refuse there's always a line up behind them? Why pay a designer for their time when you can simply crowdsource your logo and pick from the dozens of applicants who have just done free work for you? Why schedule projects so that your workers can see their families and live lives, when you know that there will always be someone like me in 2008, who was at the office every day for a month? Why stop taking if people keep giving?

You have to take control in the only way you can. You can't control the actions of others, but you can control your own. After that scary walk home in early 2010, I made decisions. I began using contracts. I set a hard day rate. I learned to say no. I set boundaries of time. I set expectations. And I worked like hell to be worth it. And you know what? I'm still here, still working, and happy. Do things still get crazy sometimes? Do I occasionally overbook or overcommit? Sure, I'm human. But those times are the exceptions and they are always on terms I agree to. I've had some wonderful, professional, respectful clients. I'll be honest - I'm not a super wealthy guy. My wife and I live simply, but we live well. I don't have an iPad, but I did preorder Dark Souls and will do the same for Skyrim later this year.. I don't have a crazy car, but I do rock a sweet PT Cruiser that is every bit the luxury car I could want. I don't have a snazzy DSLR, but my I have a decent point-and-shoot and know how to use Photoshop. We're not foodies like many of our friends, but we eat well and I make a great homemade pizza. My wife makes bread that is cheaper and 100x better than store bought. We didn't buy some hip breed of dog, but we do have the greatest domesticated spawn of a barn cat money can't buy. Our apartment isn't huge, but it's in a lovely neighborhood. We get by, and we do it well. And I actually see my family. We won't be here forever, and I don't want to sell that time away.

Setting boundaries means you have to become more creative, and work even harder. Because if clients can't get you as cheaply and can't expect you to work 60 hour weeks, you have to be worth it. You may not be able to live that fabled lifestyle of the hip, wealthy designer, partying at swanky clubs, living in your big downtown apartment, driving cool cars and buying all of the latest stuff Apple pops out this month. But you will be able to live, have relationships, and be happy on your own terms. And after a certain point, all of that other stuff becomes much less important to you anyway.

But, of course, that may not be your thing. You may want the 80 hour weeks. You may wear the circles under your eyes and the heart palpitations as some sort of badge. You may love telling stories about how crazy you are and how this is what the industry is like, brah. Godspeed. I hope you remain healthy and happy. I, however, will be working as well - and also hanging out with friends, being reasonably prolific in making my own stuff, petting my cat and taking long walks with my wife. I just think it's better for me this way. Your results may vary.

PS - Some notes on the cartoon I posted above: You may detect a slight authoritarian/quasi-racist vibe in the Joe's body sequences. This isn't all that strange, as the company was run by right wing separatists. They were part of a group that was going to get a bunch of people to move to South Carolina and secede. It was a bizarre year. The air was so thick with it that I honestly didn't pick up the comparatively subtle undertones in the cartoon until a year or so later. So awful. Seriously, feel free to mock and ridicule that short as much as you like. I'll join right in.

Oh, what, you want MORE discussion of this topic? Well, you are in luck!

I made a desktop wallpaper almost by accident

2011-09-23T21:51:00.000-05:00

I was working on something else and decided to make one of the patterns a wallpaper. Download and enjoy the autumn-ness!

Download the full-sized version here!

Potential WIP #4

2011-09-23T01:45:00.002-05:00

Hey, you know what the great hard drive crash of 2011 DIDN'T destroy? Potential, which is still in progress after a crazy couple of months kept me away from it.

Post-Mortem - The Murf

2011-09-06T23:12:00.001-05:00

Hey! It's a music video! And a fairytale version of our history as a species! And a look at time, life, survival and technology! ALL IN ONE! And now I'm going to give you a somewhat truncated look at it, though I will be linking to a more in-depth going over of it.

First off, the single for this track is available for preorder here. If you're interested in a version that includes the video, click here. Support these dudes.

The awesome guys from Rendezvous contacted me two days before Christmas last year about doing a video for one of the tracks on their upcoming album. They gave me more or less carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with it. We settled on a concept in February and I got started. Five weeks later I was done. I was simultaneously also doing the first two episodes of Living In a River City, along with some other freelance work and putting together pitches (which I will post someday). By the time April rolled around, I was both exhausted and dying to get outside the apartment.

Initially, the video was going to be comparing and contrasting how quickly life moves in the universe - insects and small things living for days, people living for decades, and stars "living" for eons. I was reading a big book on evolution at the time, and wanted to do something involving the progression of life and how it marches on despite it's fragility. These concepts are in the final video, but it started taking on a life of its own.

I'm rather exhausted at the moment, so I will spare you a long, long, long writeup about everything rolling around in my head behind this video. My wife assures me that it's pretty easy to figure out what I was trying to do and say with it, and I'm trying to wean myself off of writing a short novel hammering home every point I'm trying to make in excruciating detail. However, I did an interview yesterday with the nice kids at Motionographer where I talk about the video and the visual style in more detail. You can read it here. It's got lots of production stills and info. I will say that the sharp angles, the pixelly fires, square lens blurs and the mosaic overlays tie into the story and theme. It's not just a style (though it is stylish, if I do say so myself).

Anyway, other than a few texture overlays and some clouds I drew in Photoshop, the video is 100% After Effects. Never underestimate the solid layer. It will never fail you. As always, if you have any specific questions about how something was made, I'm all ears.

Here are a few reflections.

My wife came up with the whale-worshippers dance. I came up with the other one. COLLABORATION.

I felt bad killing the dinosaurs. Sorry guys.

Before doing this video I had never really done quadruped walk or run cycles. I might have in the distant past, but I certainly don't remember it. You learn something new everyday.

The humanoids in this are officially unisex. If you'd like to pick specific ones that you think are guys or girls, be my guest.

I really liked the martian explorer. I want to do another short just about his awesome adventures. The guy is raising crops on MARS. Awesome.

You know who don't get enough credit? The people who jumped from cliffs in flying contraptions that completely and utterly failed. People laugh and call them idiots, but they were bravely trying to do the impossible. Eventually, some succeeded.

Welcome to my futurecity, where every elevated walk has a canal, and everyone had a weird hologram gadget. This shot was actually inspired by the neighborhood I was living in when I was making this, the south side of Pittsburgh. There are neighborhoods built on some very steep hills there and they have these endless walkway/stair combinations running all up and down them. They were built a century ago to aid the mass of workers walking to and from the steel mills that aren't there any more.

This was the first thing I did for the video, and it directly inspired the next short I'm doing.

This inspired this.

One of the things I do when I am very stressed and can't sleep is watch youtube videos of people playing NES games from my youth. I was very stressed at the time, and I think some of the first level of Battletoads crept into this circuit board design. Or maybe Marble Madness.

It must have been weird once fire became something people used often. Suddenly you notice that there's another camp on the hill next to you. And look at all of those people on the mountains. Not as alone as you thought you were.

To wrap up:

This was an important project for me. Last year saw some big changes for me, which I have written about extensively elsewhere. Doing this story, in hindsight, was part of me realigning and rewriting how I view our past and our future. It was also the first time I did a short with no dialogue and no text. Trying to communicate emotions or humor or feeling that way was a wonderful exercise. It definitely makes me want to do more music videos, especially for instrumentals. Of course, because I made it, there are parts of it that I don't like as much. But overall I'm pretty proud of it. After 6 months of looking at it there just sitting on my hard drive, I'm interested in what you think. I hope you like it.

Lastly, go check out Rendezvous. The single for this song has several awesome remixes (one of which I am cutting a remix of this video to as we speak). Hagai and Itai are super-swell guys as well. Go check them out on youtube and grab the album they have coming out soon. I don't shill for people simply because I do work for them. They really are very cool, talented people who make good music. Go support them!

Sneaky Peeky

2011-09-04T15:37:00.004-05:00

This won't be out for a couple of months, but I was too excited not to post at least a censored preview.

New prints! For sale! Now!

2011-09-04T13:27:00.005-05:00

Available now at the shop!

Soon.

2011-08-23T02:04:00.002-05:00

This is all happening soon. Very soon.

Every shirt I've done for The World/Inferno Friendship Society

2011-08-22T18:52:00.009-05:00

I used to do a lot of band merch. I do not anymore. However, my door is always open for the kids in The World/Inferno Friendship Society.

I even did a video for them what seems like a million years (1 and 3/4 years) ago.

I'm working on a bunch of new shirt designs for them as we speak. So, in honor of the ongoing retrospective thing I've been doing around here in preparation for my 30th birthday this friday, I will now post every shirt design I've done for WIFS in the past 5 years. Oh god. 5 years. I've been making tshirts for this band for 5 years. Half a decade. Longer than I was in high school. Almost as long as I've been married.

I have not put these in chronological order. Try to pick out the oldest/newest. HINT: the older ones are not very good. And most of them are old.

I'm still not sure how I feel about these.

Favorite!

SO DARK. The kids liked it, though.

Not sure what's happening here with the Cup 'o Tentacles.

Great song.

OH NO MY HEART. IT HAS EVAPORATED.

That stem is weirdly veiny.

This is an oldie and it is way too close to the reference material.

Ugh. This was a low point in the long history of my struggle to draw hands. We have since found ways to coexist.

Poor Peter Lorre. Totally melting. Coming apart at the seams.

I don't know if this one actually got made, but I do like how friendly and helpful the pumpkin guy looks.

Mischief! City on fire!

Not quite sure what style this is, but I still like it.

Another defeat and the hands of hands.

Look at that cat! That is an action-cat. I remember the printers screwed up this shirt and I was disappointed.

You know what? This isn't even all of them! I'm missing a few here and there.

I'm not what you would call easily influenced, but this band has left such a mark on me that I dare say they were the most important single band I discovered in my 20s. It would be hard to come up with a soundtrack to the last decade which did not heavily feature them.

Showing My Work: Hemisphere Boreal

2011-08-18T23:03:00.009-05:00

So I had this idea awhile ago, and thought that this would be a good time to try it out. You may find it interesting but it may also be terribly dull, so feel free to skip it and watch something fun.

In general, I like knowing how people make things. If like to know how the trick is done. I like to know what their influences are, what inspired them, what ideas they got from where. That's not always easy to do. You draw a picture of a horse not realizing that it owes a great deal to a children's book you recently saw. Or you draw a map that is really influenced by one you saw in a state park or something. With the recent print I made, it's actually somewhat easy to trace my influences, so I thought I'd do a post about what I used to make it and where I took those influences from.

Beyond simple curiosity, I have a few other reasons for wanting to do posts like this and for encouraging other artists to do the same. Firstly, to show that there is nothing particularly magical or superhuman about creative work. That is not to say that there aren't incredible, numinous-seeming moments of inspiration, brilliance and connection. That's my favorite part of it, and one of the things that keeps me coming back. But the vast majority of it is simple, unglamorous work. It's like writing or playing an instrument. I wish someone had showed me that at a younger age; it would have saved me years of wondering why everything seemed so much like, well, labor. It also gives you an interesting look into the mind of the artist, and perhaps it can give a sense of how their mind mixes things together. Secondly, in an era where seemingly every piece of art ever made can be viewed and saved, there is more straight-up plagiarism than ever before. Yes, everything is in some loose sense a remix, but you all know what I'm talking about here. So it's good to call out your sources and give credit to the elements that you are "remixing". Acknowledge the shoulders on which you stand. Thirdly, introducing the elements that go into your work allows others to discover those elements and points the way for them to make their own thing. If I hadn't read books about the techniques developed by early animators, I wouldn't know where to being to make a walk cycle. Showing how something is made helps others make things as well. I know a lot of artists get really insecure and protective about that kind of thing, guarding their secrets and techniques because they are afraid that they will be devalued if everyone knows how to do it. And sometimes they are right. But if we all do that, art slows down and becomes an exclusive club. And I never would have been able to make anything if there weren't other people who were open about how they make things.

So anyway.

I already spoke about the original inspiration - a big glow in the dark star chart I had as a child. I loved it so much and wish I had kept it. Imagine a big old print of the night sky. It had a few more colors than mine, but it was mostly black, white and blue. It was much larger, and it used these lovely classical-looking images for the constellations. Like line-drawings of marble statues, only instead of standing still they were whirling around the north star. So lovely. I couldn't find an image for it (it was probably from the 50's or something - I had retrieved it from a garage sale), but National Geographic has done successive versions that bear some resemblances. I found this image of a much different 1970 edition on another blog:

Still the same kind of constellation drawings. So you can already see the resemblance.

I had worked on a video earlier this year (MORE ON THAT IN A FEW WEEKS!) and in it ended up making two simple constellations of my own. That got me wanting to do a whole chart of my own original constellations. About a week into working on it I received in the mail a copy of one of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library collections. And what do you know, a few pages inside he had also done a glow in the dark constellation chart with his own constellations. His was different enough from what I was going for, but it still gave me pause. He is already a huge influence on me and we also share a lot of influences (particularly old turn of the century ephemera, full of detail and ornamentation). I had no hope of surpassing his ideas and execution so I abandoned the idea. This happens to me a lot - I start something and, a week or so later, see something I like that is similar enough to it and it takes the wind out of my sails, perhaps out of intimidation and perhaps out of a fear of inadvertently ripping it off. I'm sure other people have similar issues. I couldn't find a good picture of Ware's incredibly ornate star chart, but here's a sketch of it, courtesy of this site:

And another print he did with his own constellations:

Again, you can see the influence.

I started over, less interested in making my own constellations than doing something of a classic chart. I really love art that is in some way informative or educational (and I'm not alone in this). I once met a girl who was a cartography major and after the initial wtf moment, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was also one of the only times in my youth in which a girl approached me, but I didn't notice because HOLY CRAP YOU'RE A CARTOGRAPHY MAJOR? Who doesn't want to just make maps and maps and maps? I think she gave me her number (shocking, I know!) but I was still just interested in hearing about map-making. Anyway, back in the present, I regrouped and started looking for some good reference material. Thankfully, I had the internet!

Dopplemayr's atlas was a great place to start. When working on something like this it's nice to remember that you are merely the latest in a long, long line of people who have done it. We all look back and find the vocabulary that works to express something.

Fortin gave me a name. Well, it's not really a name, it's just a label. It means northern hemisphere. I think it was attractive to me because I've always found the term aurora borealis to be one of the most beautiful word pairings ever conceived. Screw your cellar door, Donnie Darko.

I knew also that I didn't want to do one of those perfectly round maps. Something close to the Mollweide projection was what I was after. The shape of it always reminds me of an eye. In trying to find a way to get the exact view of the heavens I wanted, I discovered one of the best things I've seen this year.

Stellarium is an open source planetarium program. It is free and it is wonderful. You should be downloading it now. Seriously. Do it. I'll wait. It was incredibly helpful to me in terms of figuring out the placement of the constellations and how they related to one another. I wanted there to be some little bits of interplay between them, so this was invaluable. Stellarium has some lovely constellation designs, as well.

After finding all of that, I just sat and drew and drew and drew. I added the phases of the moon because every big map needs those 4 corner bits. Old world maps had the four winds, Dopplemayr had little angels, Ware had his virtues, even the old National Geographic star charts had different planets in the corners. It just felt wrong to leave them bare. I wanted to stick with things you could easily see in the night sky, and we just so happened to have a massive full moon on the night I was making this part. So the moon crept into the corners of the chart. I wanted something to read as well, and constellation lore is fascinating and not particularly well known, so it went in.

And that was pretty much it. Well, that plus a lot of drawing and redrawing and checking and obsessing and worrying that it wasn't very good. I do too much of that.

Anyway, now that you've read this whole thing, I have an assignment for you: make your own. Take these influences and whatever else you like and make a chart of your own. It's a big undertaking but in the end I think you'll find it was worth it. And I'd love to see it.

Tadly Weeklies #12

2011-08-15T01:35:00.001-05:00

Tadly can sing mostly on key, and the bear can almost play the concertina!

Tadly bear is available here!

Hemisphere Boreal and some notes on the ghosts of bad art past

2011-08-13T22:37:00.013-05:00

Look! I made a print! It's a nice one too, I think. It's available for sale here. It's a big 18x24 3-color print on 140lb black Speckletone French Paper (ooh la la!) and it GLOWS IN THE FREAKING DARK. It contains 32 labeled constellations, 4 phases of the moon, some constellation lore and a bunch of other details. It's in a limited edition of 100, signed and numbered. When they're gone, they're gone. This thing is quite thick and substantial-feeling, too. If you bought 5 or 6 of them, i do think you could construct a sturdy little house out of them. Proceeds from this will mainly be going to getting set up to make loads more prints regularly. The plan is to do giclee prints on a regular basis and big scary screenprints every couple of months. You can help make this happen!

Earlier this year I did a music video (which hasn't been released yet, but you'll definitely dig it when it is). The video involved a constellation as a central element, and it got me wanting to draw some more. When I was young, I used to get boxes of old National Geographics from garage sales. One of them had this big fold-out star chart that glowed in the dark. I loved mythology and would stay up reading about constellations and the myths behind them in our Collier's Encyclopedias. It was so cool to look up into the sky and see the same things people saw there millennia ago, and read the ways they made sense of them.

As a side note, I think my greatest achievement as a child was reading our entire series of encyclopedias front to back between 2nd grade and 5th grade. It's one of those things you can't boast about without sounding like a self-satisfied jerk, but seriously, I think you should have some bragging rights for such a feat. Other kids were all-county in track, or won a spelling bee, or actually did homework. I sat in my room and read the encyclopedias. I remember one of the yearly supplementals (88 0r 89) had this big awesome section on bats for some reason. That was great. I did an extra credit report on bats to make up for the homework I didn't do.

Anyway, my fond remembrance of those olden times and my evergreen love of cool semi-educational stuff lead me to want to do a star chart of my own.

I drew it in early April, right after completing the aforementioned unreleased music video. I used a large amount of resources for visual reference and read much more about the stars and the constellations themselves than I ever had before. The whole design took a couple of weeks to get through, partly on account of the work I was doing for Riverlife at the time.

As mentioned earlier, like all good star charts this one glows in the dark. The designs are different in the dark - the moons have faces, Hercules is wearing the head of the lion, and so on. The glow in the dark looks like faded grey in normal light, but when charged this thing really shines in the dark.

In making this, I also learned how to photograph glow in the dark stuff. I am ashamed at how long it took me to get it looking good.

Anyway, this the first print in what is hopefully a long series. I have a lot of ideas I'd love to do! Stay tuned. In the meantime, if so moved, go and grab one for yourself. Bethany, Ico and I would very much appreciate it.

Bethany not included with purchase.

Oh, and the print was hand-screened by my friends at Commonwealth Press. More on that specific process soon, but for now let me say this: they are just fantastic. I've known those guys for years, have worked with them a few times and will continue going back until they grow tired of me. If you are ever in need of some expert print-makers, do make it Commonwealth Press.

Note: I used to sell prints at my Etsy shop in 2006, and 2008. If you were ever interested in how my art has evolved over the years (ie:how awful I was 5 years ago), looking at past sales there is as good a way as any. I had only really started doing a digital art in 2004, and I really had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was a late entrant into this whole world. You younger guys and gals who are reading this - you've got time.

WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS THIS?

I think I'm making some statement here. I'm not sure.

I suppose I didn't really come into a style of my own that I was happy with until 2009 sometime. I spend about 5 years trying to draw like other people. That's a long time. It makes me happy/wary that the things I make now may seem to me in 2016 as things I made in 2006 do to me now. That was a confusing sentence. There was one print from 2008 that I still dig and would like to rework.

We'll see...

Happy 25th, Metroid!

2011-08-11T21:26:00.002-05:00

Super Metroid. Be still, my heart. I want to go play it now.

Gametrailers did a decent-sized video series on the Metroids a couple of years back. I think it's worth a watch. Check it out here.

Tadly Weeklies #11

2011-08-01T11:30:00.000-05:00

He doesn't even meow correctly.

Roadside America

2011-07-29T15:55:00.013-05:00

On the way from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, Interstate 76 runs through a long stretch of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Rolling hills, farmlands and old tumbled down barns dot the landscape. Here you can find some of the easternmost outposts of the Amish, and most everyone else is of German or Scots-Irish descent. Driving through here you will find a great deal of PA Dutch kitsch - billboards with ye olde timey font, hex signs, and Amish-themed restaurants. You'll also find a large amount of tourist attractions, mostly caves, each with their own claim to fame. "See it by boat!" "Genuine Indian Artifacts!" "See the Colossal Stalactite Gallery!"

But perhaps the greatest attraction in Eastern PA, and possibly one of the best things ever created, may be found right on I-76 in Shartlesville. Next to an Amish-themed gift shop and a dicey-looking restaurant sits Roadside America, the world's largest miniature village. The sign on the building makes several claims of its own to the potential visitor:
"Worlds Greatest Indoor MINIATURE VILLAGE"
"RECOMMENDED IN A.A.A. PUBLICATION"
"BE PREPARED TO SEE MORE THAN YOU EXPECT"

I cannot argue with any of those claims. It is amazing.

It's too much to take in with one massive picture, so I took plenty. You're going to want to click and enlarge all of these pictures to get an idea of the detail and scale.

A view from the upper level, with real live Mennonites for scale.

Roadside America was built by Laurence Gieringer, a carpenter and painter, from the early 1930s through 1963, the year he died. He had a lifelong love of models, driven by views of local towns from atop a mountain. The models haven't been altered or moved since his death, and apparently aren't touched apart from cleaning and small bits of maintenance. Gieringer really should be a patron saint of sorts for makers the world over. He made so many things, mostly by hand, for no other reason than he loved doing it and sharing with others. He was consistently building for decades and, in the end, made something amazing. I mean, it's incredibly impressive now but can you imagine how mind-blowing this was during the Roosevelt administration? These trains have been running since before the World War 2, before the civil rights act, possibly before your grandparents were born. The official site for Roadside America has more information on the history, including some incredible pictures and video that detail how all of this was made.

Multiple eras exist in different areas, and sometimes right on top of one another.

The aforementioned caves are viewable in cross-section down two steps and under a curtain. One of the best things about Roadside America is finding little dramas and situations like this woman in a yellow dress, all alone, admiring a cavern.

Or this couple, hanging back from the group.

It's a lost world, right under Pennsylvania!

A couple and their dachshund watch the roadwork.

One very full playground.

Shoppers at Kaufmann's, a baseball game in progress.

A nun, a bus, a horse-drawn carriage and the most patriotic garden ever.

It's move-in day and Kaufmann's is there too. Just look at the detail on that house. The shingles!

A lot could be written about the version of America painted by Roadside America. It was an idealized portrait, even in its time. It's a self-sustaining countryside of happy farms, non-polluting factories with fulfilled workers, and pleasantly rustic coal mines. There is a car in every driveway and every suburban development is pristine and populated with friendly people. Every small town bustles with growth and activity. There is a church in every hamlet, and God himself looks over his creation alongside the Statue of Liberty and the flag. No, really. Every 20 minutes or so, the bulbs dim and the visitor is treated to a night-time pageant. The lights grow pink, then blue, and then go out. The windows in the towns below light up. And then Jesus appears.

Like countless other displays of this uniquely American mythology, it rides the lines between "Wait, are they serious?"-level kitschyness, liturgical observance, and honest to goodness inspiration. If you want to see the past (and indeed, the ideal future) through the minds of American cultural conservatives, you need look no further. A large part of my country fetishizes this very specific ideal time and place. To this day you can readily hear talk of "small town" or "traditional" values, as if rural areas of a specific period had access to some great secret store of goodness. History tells a far more complicated story, but then history is rarely what we want it to be.

That isn't to say that Roadside America is itself politicized in any meaningful way - I honestly don't think it is. It merely reflects the ideas of its time, and the issues of today were not the issues of Gieringer's time. The way in which native Americans are treated is a prime example of this.

True to early 20th century culture, Indians are depicted as wise, noble savage forebears who were the custodians of the land (until we were ready to have it, of course). Also true to the times, they are simultaneously depicted as regular, non-noble savages in thrilling combat with settlers and cowboys.

The native American portions of the exhibit are crammed into the back corners, with strangely out of place life-sized statues kneeling, solemnly looking out over an America rendered painstakingly in miniature. Like all of the other life-sized people who now peer over this smaller vision of the country, they have no place there.

Potential WIP #3

2011-07-22T02:22:00.002-05:00

I have to be careful, of course, but the structure of this short is such that I can share a decent amount of shots without really spoiling any of it. It's also more or less melting my brain right now.

My wife is awesome.

2011-07-21T05:42:00.003-05:00

She just is. She's smart, she's lovely, she's funny, she's curious, and she's always always always making things.

This is a picture of her, with the things she makes.

She's also a somewhat prolific blogger. She posts about her work, her process, the ins and outs of running your own traveling art business, cute pictures in general, and the central Penna countryside which gave her birth. Go check her out and check back often - she posts multiple times a week. And since our cat, Ico, is attached to her at the hip and always up in her business, you'll often be treated to pictures like this.

If you're interested in me and the stuff that I make, you should know that she has some hand in everything I do, be it ideas, a sounding board, or making sure things don't fall apart when I get sucked into a project so completely that she has to remind me to sleep. I can't count how many times I've worked myself to the point where I am quite literally delirious and she's guided me off of the computer and into bed. And then there are the times when I'm convinced that I am a talentless hack throwing ideas out into the void, and she reminds me that I'm and idiot for thinking so.

Her business, Cleo Dee's, is also a bit of my business as well. I do all of the signage, graphic designy stuff, and the lifting of heavy objects. And of course Tadly is our baby. From September to Christmas we are on the road almost every weekend, all over the east coast and midwest doing indie craft shows. Check in from time to time on her page, as you might catch the both of us in a city near you this year. We'd love to say hello, chat and sell you a squid.

Oh, and while we're at it, here's a picture of me that pairs with the image at the top.

Men's Fashion Blogs Are Officially Screwing With Us Now.

2011-07-16T01:41:00.004-05:00

The momentarily-all-important trends. The awful colors. The disdain for anyone who looks poor, or at least like they are dressed for work. The indignation toward people who "don't care what we think of them". The obsession with class. These are all things that turn me off to the world of men's fashion.

I'm going to lapse into a bit of cultural criticism here, so please indulge me.

I've no problem at all with people wanting to wear whatever they'd like, and whatever they think looks best on them. Indeed, I very much applaud a personal sense of style, or someone who can just dress well. I come out of the whole punk scene, so I really do respect people who can convincingly wear something outlandish and make it their own. I'm almost 30 and still have a facial piercing. So no judgements here.

That having been said, my main issue with the growing body of blogging about men's fashion is this obsession with what "being a man" is all about. There's this constant, just-below-the-surface message in men's sartorial writing, and it is this: "If you dress this way, you will finally be an adult". It's as if a generation of men entering their 30s have no idea if they have really made it. Instead of judging one's adulthood (whatever that means) on things such as choices, they instead have looked at Mad Men and said "Here are some men who dress sharply and they seemed to be on top of things and be cool adults. I need to do just that." Back then, wealthy white men were indeed on top of things. We've come a long way since the early 60s, and that's not a bad thing. At all. There's a fetish here for control and the trappings of control. And it belies a massive insecurity and a childish obsession with "dressing like a grown-up". This nostalgia for a time when "men knew how to be men" reminds me, in spirit, of something Evelyn Waugh once wrote about the time during the second World War in which he wrote Brideshead Revisited:

"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster... and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful."

If you'd like to dress "better", than by all means - go and do it. I myself am planning on sprucing up the old wardrobe (once I lose about 30 pounds) with some sharper-looking button-down shirts and pants. But don't do it just so that you can wear a costume of established masculinity. This assumes that there is some baseline uber-form of maleness. If that is true, does it follow that some women are more true to femaleness than others? Is there some ideal femininity to which all women must adhere? See where I'm going with this?

You can try to dress, shave, and carry yourself like your father/grandfather/greatgrandfather/your idealized vision of real manhood all you like, but really you're just playing around with the aesthetics. Aesthetics are important, but they will not make you anything. Time and time again I come back to my old standby adage - everyone wants to be something, but no one wants to do anything. Take care of others. Take care of your responsibilities. Do something. People will take notice. And we might compliment you on your salmon and turquoise blazer when we do it.

Oh, this was inspired by looking at the GQ website for 30 minutes today. I mean this as respectfully as possible, but they can fuck the fuck off.

Also - I know that the world of women's fashion is like 1000 times worse.

Potential WIP #2

2011-07-15T16:10:00.003-05:00

Potential WIP #1

2011-07-12T21:55:00.001-05:00

Tadly Weeklies #10

2011-07-11T21:44:00.001-05:00

Not one bit.

Making Things: The Workspace

2011-07-08T21:33:00.009-05:00

I spend most of my day, and year, and therefore life at my desk. I make everything I make there. It's where I watch movies and TV. It's usually the first place I listen to an album. I do a huge amount of reading there. I'm also an avid gamer.

Now, before you start worrying about a sedentary life, I also walk or hike several miles almost every day. More on that in another post.

I am not the sort of artist who makes loads and loads of money. We obviously do just fine, but our habitation options are limited to medium-sized, older apartments. We generally pick a place in halfway-decent shape and then do a massive amount of fixing up. If we ever were to move into a place that needed little to make it habitable, I think we wouldn't feel it was ours. That said, I often find myself gazing longingly at the Lifehacker workspace features.

When we moved last month, it became clear both that my old desk would not fit into the new space, and that we could not afford to get me a nice new one. Thankfully, the previous tenants left their kitchen table (along with much of their dust and cigarette butts). We got some risers and shelves from Ikea and I set about making a new workspace.

I need to get some cable ties and clean up the wires. Someday, perhaps when I replace my workstation in 4 or 5 years, all of this will be wireless out of the box. Fingers crossed. I don't like to keep a cluttered desk, but it happens without my noticing. There is also rarely a time during a work session that a Coke Zero isn't on the desk somewhere. Oh, you probably noticed I don't use a Mac. That is for two reasons. 1: I like the open nature of having a PC. I like tinkering with it and using it for a wide variety of things. 2: It would have cost almost twice as much money to get a Mac workstation with slower processors and graphics card. Not worth it.

I find that I must have books around. I've got the typical books you'd expect an animator to have - some Preston Blair, Eric Goldberg, and the amazing Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. Along with reference books, I also tend to keep things that are just fun or cool to look at - my collections of Mike Mignola and Chris ware, along with the 1990-91 issues of Nintendo Power I got off of Ebay to replace the ones I lost since my youth. I also keep a few books of folklore and other things that are good to flip through when the ideas aren't coming. Oh, on the far left you can see a ceramic Slowpoke my sister made me when she was younger. He was always my favorite Pokemon.

Fun story: Back in 1998 I was at the mall with my friends. We were your typical teen mall-rat punks of the day. I was in a Wizards of The Coast store looking at miniatures or something when I spotted the brand-new Pokemon card section. I walked over to check them out. Some 10 year old was rifling through the cards.
"Pokemon is COOL", he said.
"Yessir, it is", I said. "What's your favorite Pokemon?"
"Charmander is my favorite", he replied. "What's yours?"
"Slowpoke!", I answered.
The 10 year old looked at me with a mix of confusion and scorn. He loudly scolded me.
"Slowpoke's the dumbest because HE'S THE SLOWPOKE-IEST!"
"Hey kid, how 'bout I throw you down the escalator?" I replied.
That ended the conversation.
Note : I have not threatened a child since. I did not actually pitch him down the escalator. He probably deserved it, though.

Thankfully, our bookshelves are in our office/living room in the new place. This shelf is directly to my left. I was a devout christian for most of my life, but have in the not-so-distant past publicly "come out" as an atheist. As such, my shelves are full of books I collected during both eras of my life. Some for study, and others for comfort. I still have a massive English/Hebrew/Greek Keyword Bible from my years as a weekly speaker, so if anyone ever brings up a word like koinonia, I'm totally ready. I also have the edition of Candide with the Chris Ware cover, and that's just a match made in heaven for me.

Also on my desk, my current reading slate. The book on the left is extremely quick, enjoyable reading. The book on the right I will be starting on Monday. I'm not a comics artist, but I often feel I have more in common with this kind of cartoonist than I do with the vast majority of animators who write helpful books. Or maybe I'm just not a very good animator. It's one of the two.

Behind me is stacked the growing pile of storyboards for Potential. I got about a minute into it and realized that I needed to get far more organized because it was getting too complicated. So enjoy this EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEAK!

Finally, here's the little ideas book I carry around with me. Here's the initial sketch and idea for Man and Cat At The End Of The World. I think I drew these during Tiny Canary, an annual craft show in Ohio that we usually do.

Here's some ideas for Ghost Pilgrims that I jotted down during a craft show in Atlanta last November.

So that's a small tour of where it is that I make things. Someday I'll have some amazing, esthetically perfect and super-conducive-to-work alternate-zen-dimension of a workspace. For now, though, this will do.

And, while I had the camera out, I took some cat pictures in the kitchen:

Ico Benson : Best Cat.

Tadly Weeklies #9

2011-07-04T15:35:00.000-05:00

Undercover Title Sequence

2011-06-30T13:58:00.004-05:00

Hey! Want to see something I didn't art direct?

Earlier this year I did animation for this intro. The client was Visual Creatures and John Cranston gave me probably the best experience I've had with a creative director. The look of the piece was great and well-defined, the boards and direction were clear, and the notes I got back were helpful and insightful. I did some bits of design here and there, like tweaking the characters and such, but I was pretty much just an animator on this spot. That doesn't happen very often and it was a nice break from the somewhat rigorous work, art-wise, that I had going on at that point.

Anyway, check out Visual Creatures. They are good people.

What the 90s were actually like.

2011-06-29T09:18:00.002-05:00

Shocking, I know.

I just wanted to set the record straight.

Loopdeloop - Opposites

2011-06-28T19:24:00.006-05:00

So I really did mean to get this done in time. Really. A tardy entry for June's Loopdeloop. Check it out, and if you're an animator, you should totally participate in the future. It's a cool idea that attracts animators of all skill levels, and it'll force you to become better just by working within the constraints.

Oh, and the theme in June was opposites, so I did day and night. Maybe next time I'll actually finish it in time. This is high school all over again!

Things have been busy and hectic. We moved (pics when the place is together). I've been pretty hard at work but don't have anything that I can really show as of yet. This summer, however... there will be some big new pieces to show - one of which I am very happy with, another I am still working on. It's eating my brain. My poor brain. See? THIS is why my entry was tardy. HALF-EATEN BRAIN.

Post-Mortem - Kyra's Story

2011-06-07T16:45:00.001-05:00

Note - this is the last of the Riverlife post-mortems. For the full treatment check out the other write-ups here and here. Thanks for reading!

Well well well. Here we are at the very last of the Riverlife episodes. I realize that I didn't do a post-mortem for number three, but that was because I was very busy and it was extremely straight forward. Nothing much to write about, except for the fact that I liked the turtle quite a bit and I think Louise is adorable. It was hands-down the simplest one and yet at this point I think that Riverlife has gotten the biggest response from it, so shows how much I know.

Kyra's Story, on the other hand, was anything but simple. It was supposed to be. Originally it was supposed to be easily the simplest of the four spots, a nice peaceful little ending with a cute kid on a bridge, looking at the river. In fact, check out the original storyboards:

But then Stephen over at Riverlife wanted to do something special for the final episode, some sort of big stylistic departure. He was super-cool and left the details and the decision in my hands. Riverlife have been nothing but awesome and flexible this entire time and I wanted to do something cool with their project. I took a couple of nights and came up with the whole revolving-scenery thing and Stephen said "rock on". And so I did and all was well. I cranked out the first and last shots pretty easily over a few nights. They were done in the typical fashion, a blend of 3d and forced perspective. As is tradition, here they are from slightly different angles so you can see how they were put together.

But then I hit a snag. And we are going to talk about it.

I had to come up with a shot that showcased the Smithfield Street Bridge and Station Square during both night and day. The visual direction worked well for characters moving along a river bank, with the river and the far shore parallel to them. But a character walking across a bridge couldn't be easily placed into that formula. The river would have to run longitudinally. And for some reason, my brain just broke. That happens to everyone at some point. For reasons sometimes good and sometimes inexplicable, you just can't think of what to do. For three entire days I banged my head against the wall trying to solve this incredibly simple problem. I started building it several times, only to get a few hours in and realize that it didn't work, or clashed violently with the styles of the first and last shots. I honestly can't remember an instance in which I had so much trouble solving such a simple problem. And then, one morning, while falling asleep after a frustrating all-nighter working at it, my increasingly erratic sketches hatched on something that might work.

Somewhere in the squiggles, near the bottom of the page, it clicked.

Having that kind of experience makes you feel like the most brilliant person alive, and then immediately the stupidest. You realize that solving a problem, while fantastic, is a response to a problem. And sometimes the problem is your own lack of an idea. So the enormity of the solving is also a referendum on the enormity of the problem. And so on. I feel good about it, though. I bashed my way through it and I'm reasonably happy with the results. The client loved it. Sometimes making things is hard, and that's ok.

This spot made me weirdly familiar with downtown Pittsburgh. I don't really spend a lot of time downtown, other that driving through it. I go there for client meetings, sometimes the wife and I take a long walk to the other side of it during the summer, and sometimes we catch the ballet. But after making THREE DIFFERENT angles of it for this spot, plus another for Emily's Story, I know it like the back of my hand. We were driving over the Birmingham Bridge today and I looked out the window and had flashbacks of placing the 130-odd individual little buildings I made for these spots. How did I do it? Secret Weapon. I have to say, making these has really made me reflect on the city in which I live, and notice it more. I feel like I have this odd relationship with it. I feel like I drew it like one of my french girls.

I put one final touch on the episode, and that was Kyra popping up at the beginning. That was also a completely optional idea from Stephen, since Kyra was so swallowed up and far away when compared to how intimately the other narrators were featured.

KEYFRAMES : Because the best things in life aren't procedurally generated.

Also: the other three narrators are in the video, as is a character from one of my own shorts. Upon request from the client, there is an honest-to-goodness football player. Pittsburgh enjoys sports more than just about any place I've ever been. Oh, and the one cyclist has tattoos. That was fun.

I don't usually post-mortem client work for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's not particularly interesting - some motion graphics here, some compositing there. Often it's just not something I can talk about in detail for professional reasons. But these spots were different. I was given a large amount of creative control and the scope of the episodes were such that I wanted to dig into them a bit more. And the client was amazingly cool with me being transparent about the process. I can't remember a time when I've had a more enjoyable and easy relationship with a client. Riverlife have been just fantastic. I've enjoyed making these immensely. I got to try out a bunch of ideas and got to know my own city better. I hope we can do some more in the future.

It's an amusing coincidence that I am moving today to the east end of Pittsburgh. In fact, I am writing this post on Saturday night and scheduling it to automatically post on Wednesday because I'm going to be without internet for a week in the new place. When I finish typing this, I'm going to shut down and pack up my workstation. In a few hours, some friends are coming over to help us move over the bridges, away from the rivers. I won't be taking leisurely walks along the riverside trails anymore, at least not without a drive. I'll have parks and cemeteries and fun neighborhoods to wander around, but I will miss the rivers very much. It was nice to get to know them so well.

Some Pictures I took at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

2011-06-04T01:19:00.004-05:00

Popular entertainment has caused me to associate butterflies and meticulous mounting with serial killers. Thanks!

Father, why don't we talk to the wildebeests?

One day, son, all of these rocks will be yours.

Who doesn't love a nice diorama? This guy was actually about 5 inches tall. His pants are fabulous no matter what the size.

The wall of harmless local mammals.

All of my favorite sculptures are essentially 2d pictures with a little bit of depth. Again with the flatness!

A comparison of the dna of a human and a chimpanzee in the evolution exhibit, which was hidden away in the safety of the third floor. Apparently the museum believes that reactionary creationists haven't developed the ability to climb stairs.
One can only assume this is exactly what they were doing the exact moment they were gunned down. The Hall Of Mammals is like walking through a nature documentary, only with a body count.

Potential trailer

2011-06-03T23:57:00.002-05:00

So I don't usually do trailers, but what the heck. I'm enjoying making this because it's pretty much the exact aesthetic opposite of the client work I've done this year, and roughly 1000 miles from anything Tadly related. In some ways it's actually a companion piece to a music video I did earlier this year which might, by sheer luck, be released right around the time I finish this short. So that might be cool. I also really like a good trailer, often more than the movies they advertise. A good example is the trailer for Europa. I knew I probably wouldn't like it, and every time I watch a Lars Von Trier movie I leave marveling at how memorable it was while also vowing to not watch any more Lars Von Trier movies. But I did watch Europa.

Tadly Weeklies #8

2011-05-24T01:40:00.001-05:00

It is a good dream.

Tadly Weeklies #7

2011-05-16T16:09:00.001-05:00

It is anyone's guess.

Why I Love Look Around You

2011-05-16T02:09:00.005-05:00

Moving

2011-05-10T01:18:00.001-05:00

This is the front side of a postcard we're sending to family and friends with our new address. I like it.

Tadly Weeklies #6

2011-05-09T02:37:00.002-05:00

They don't seem quite as pleased as he is.

Post-Mortem - Dick's Story

2011-05-04T01:47:00.011-05:00

Welcome, friends, to the second installment of the Living In A River City post-mortems. I went over the background info on the project last time, so let's get right into the messy details!

The Project: This was actually the first spot I did for Riverlife. It's the longest of the four and involved two versions of the main character, so I figured I'd tackle it first. You may have heard of Braddock or seen its very awesome mayor on the tv or in magazines, but I can bet you haven't seen the charming cartoon junkyard they had there 50 years ago.

In hindsight, I think the kids should have been wearing shoes, but somehow that just made them seem like they were running around in colorful briefs.

Fun fact: After completing this piece, I discovered that Josh's does indeed still exist in stately Braddock. Since Dick's recollection was a bit hazy, let's do some free advertising:

Josh's Steel : Buyers of All Scrap Metals, Roll-Off Containers Placed, Copper, Brass, Aluminum, We Pay Top Prices, Stainless Steel, Aluminum Cans, We Pay to Prices, Stainless, Scrap Iron, Roll-Off Container Placed, Cans, Industrial Pick-Up Service Available.

Pittsburgh: CITY OF INDUSTRY!

How about that floating can? Not one 3d layer or plugin used there. Make one of your own! It's fun!

This splash. I have nightmares still.

I have approximately zero interest in making things that look real. As such, every time I do something like water, I try to do it differently. This splash had me scratching my head for hours, and I spent an entire evening messing around with it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out in the end. I say "pretty happy", because I spent so long tweaking it that I will probably hate it forever. Also, it seems like I have given all of the guys stereotypical Leave It To Beaver hairstyles. They never go out of style.

But of course, the big money shot in this piece is the final scroll down the river. Here we have several miles of Monongahela River condensed to something like a football field. The neighborhood across the river would actually be where I lived in this fantasy world. Somewhere on the right end of where we end up. As stated last week, it's a bit of a fairytale rendition of the area. The real South Side has approximately 1000 bars. But we'll talk more on that in a few weeks...

Thanks to Stephen at Riverlife for not canning the project when he saw my ugly boards.

Good lord, do I love the colors in this shot. It almost makes up for the splash. Can I use these colors for everything I make from here on out?

This shot was accomplished pretty much like the bridge shot from Emily's Story, a combo of 3d layers and forced perspective. No lights, no plugins.

Here's what it looks like from a different angle. The bridge is just plain old shape layers arranged semi-cleverly. It pretty much is what it looks like. No fancy tricks there. I learned a bit in these projects about the value of doing things the hard way. As I write this, I'm surprised at how nice even the skewed angle I just posted looks. Go me.

Final Verdict - You know what my favorite part of this piece is? The standoff between Dick and the swimming poster. I also like how upsettingly small men's swimsuits were during that time in America. Seriously.

We're at the halfway point. Stay tuned for next Wednesday!

Tadly Weeklies #5

2011-05-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

Fortunately, Tadly kept his punch card and is due for a free rabies shot.

Art Project WIP #1

2011-04-30T03:47:00.003-05:00

I am pleased that this particular project lends itself very well to gif-ification.

The actual name for this project isn't "Art Project". I am amusing myself by calling it that, though. I was thinking about this the other day. There was a time in my life (and certainly this is the norm for most people) where I had my life and the things I did all of the time and then there were art projects as separate things. Now just about everything I do is somehow connected to what would be considered an art project. I prefer this arrangement. This piece is probably the least audience-friendly thing I've made, but I think it'll be rewarding for those with whom it clicks. Clickety-click-click.

Post-Mortem - Emily's Story

2011-04-27T01:44:00.015-05:00

My wife and I live a few blocks from the south shore of the Monongahela river. In spring, summer and fall you can often find us walking or biking on the lovely and well-maintained paths that run between Station Square in the west to Southside Works in the east. Those two places are more or less the bookends of our neighborhood, the south side. Several important moments, conversations and decisions of my adult life have happened as we walked along that trail.

I'm not from Pittsburgh originally. As such, my view of the place is probably a bit different from that of the natives. Pittsburgh seems to me at times to be roughly 15% city and 85% river, bridge and slope. We only have the three rivers, but the way the city is crammed into the valley where they meet makes it seem like we have about 25. Seriously. I've been all over the country and I've never seen so many bridges. Ages ago, Pittsburgh was a major industrial boomtown, as you most likely know. Factories were built practically right on the river and no one was too concerned with what they were doing to the air and water. The city has been decidedly post-industrial for decades, and the riverfront has been slowly reworked with trees, walkways, and trails like the one that we use all the time. Which brings us to:

The Project : A few months ago, Riverlife, a nonprofit advocacy/planning/guiding organization for the the redevelopment of the Pittsburgh riverfront, contacted me about doing some animated pieces. They had gathered a few interviews with people, detailing their memories and thoughts on the rivers in Pittsburgh and they wanted to visualize them. That sounded awesome, and they have been a pleasure to work with. In our initial meeting we listened to the interviews and discussed what they wanted and what ideas I had. We were on the same page from just about day one, which is always great. I did some character designs, knocked together some boards and away we went! Emily's story is the first of four episodes. I think the next episode is releasing next week with the final two coming out later. I'll do shorter, more process-focused posts on each of them.

Design-wise, I wanted something friendly and approachable. I haven't really seen Pittsburgh animated before, so I wanted to do this saturated, storybook version of it. That informed the character designs.

These are the initial sketches for the main characters of the four pieces. Kyra looks a bit more like a girl now.

In the process of making these, I boarded out some shots that later proved to be far more difficult to execute. Emily's Story contained a few of these shots, most notably the fish's-eye view of the fireworks. I like to challenge myself with shots I have no idea how to accomplish. I thankfully haven't boarded myself into a corner yet, though I certainly banged my head on the desk a few times trying to get them right. I mean, look at the sketch:

That looks easy! Let's do that!

This shot used almost no 3d layers. I was surprised at how much I was able to cheat it.

Another challenging shot was the Fort Pitt Bridge shot.

When I boarded it I thought I'd find some way to cheat it a bit more than I actually could.

In the end, I spent a while building out a semi-3d, forced-perspective version of the bridge and downtown.

Here's what it looks like from a different angle.

Final Verdict - This has been a very busy year for freelance work. Because of various scheduling plans, none of it has been released yet. This is the first to be viewable, and it feels good to put something out there. I've also had the pleasure of having some dream clients this year, and Riverlife has certainly been one of them. The amount of creative latitude I was given is rare and much appreciated. Here's to successful collaborations!

As I mentioned before, you'll be seeing more of these as the weeks go on. I hope you enjoy them!

Tadly Weeklies #4

2011-04-25T04:07:00.003-05:00

Just look at it. One can't help but be suspicious.

Portal 2 zapped my productivity tonight.

2011-04-19T03:22:00.001-05:00

But look at this. This is just great.

Tadly Weeklies #3

2011-04-18T04:51:00.000-05:00

It would henceforth be known as the frozen expedition.

The worst attempted robbery ever.

2011-04-18T00:41:00.002-05:00

He needed to work on his thievery, but his small talk was great.

The Six Worst Things I Heard Today, Plus Three Great Things

2011-04-16T19:22:00.007-05:00

Today was one of those days you sometimes have when hocking your wares. They are thankfully very, very rare. I'm going to vent about it.

Neither of us slept very well, a bunch of annoyances and issues compounded throughout the day, and we were treated to a rare amount of difficult people. Most people were awesome, but for some reason the very few who were not were very much on top of their game.

The six notable things we remembered:

#6 - A customer pointed to one of our stuffed squids and said "Look! This is so trendy! Her book says 1984. She's totally into the 80s".

#5 - A customer noticed the book that Abigail was holding and said "I don't get it, is it supposed to be patriotic or something?"

#4 - A customer read the back of Abigail's tag. "Well, she likes history, and that's all you need to tell me", he proclaimed. He then threw it down in disgust and walked away.

#3 - A customer read the tags for Tadly and Abigail. "Tadly mentions Abigail on his tag, but Abigail doesn't mention Tadly on her's. Looks like Abigail is the man in this relationship!" The customer's girlfriend squirmed and looked at us apologetically.

#2 - A customer lifted up Tadly, looked at it and said "I don't get the joke. What's this a reference to?"

#1 - Upon seeing a shelf full of Tadly, a customer said with a dismissive tone "LOOK! He's wearing glasses! He's a HIPSTER octopus!" When I explained that Tadly wears glasses because he is nearsighted and he has coke-bottle round frames because it's the same kind he had when he was a child and he is attached to them. He also needs sturdy glasses that will last. She said "Oh, you KNOW it's hipster. What's more hipster than saying it's not hipster?"

I understand how silly it is to be annoyed when someone questions the motives for glasses-wearing of a fictional character, but this struck a nerve with me. I want to put up a sign that says "We like the things we like sincerely. We make things because we love them. Please do not assume irony. We are not Tim & Eric. If you think what we make is amusingly lame, that is ok. That does not not mean we are being ironic. That just means that we are not making these for you".

On the other hand, I did see a ten year old kid who looked almost exactly like me at ten years old. He was wearing a shirt that had a constellation map of the southern hemisphere. I complemented him on it. Upon hearing it he stopped, looked down in surprise, then pulled the shirt out straight so we could see it while giving us the thumbs up. Awesome. Later, Bethany spotted the same child wandering into the bathroom, air-drumming.

This one lady just came up to Bethany and, out of nowhere, said "I think the things you make are beautiful. They're just really, really beautiful". Then she walked away. That was nice.

Then, near the end, a man came up to us and introduced himself as a fellow creative. We were visibly tired, and he said "Yeah, I'm really beat too. I just spent all morning producing a flash mob for the furries". We were obviously intrigued but he rebuffed our questions, saying "No no. I think I need to keep that under my hat for the moment".

So that was our day. I am tired. Any of you I met today who are reading this, I'm obviously not complaining about you. You were the greatest. You keep on being great.

Bed now.

Movies I Have Seen : The Passion of Joan of Arc

2011-04-12T23:18:00.011-05:00

Astonishing is the only word I have for it. Roughly 2/3 of it is taken up with Renee Jeanne Falconetti's intensely expressive face. In fact, until I watched it all I had ever heard about The Passion of Joan of Arc involved Falconetti's face and the huge amount of short close-ups that make up the movie. It's so raw and intimate that by the time it ended (spoiler: Joan doesn't make it) I almost felt that I had lost a friend, or at least a fond acquaintance. It's funny to think that I've seen Vampyr several times but until today hadn't seen Dreyer's undisputed masterpiece.

Not that Vampyr is bad. Vampyr is awesome.

Start saving your nickels.

2011-04-12T11:36:00.004-05:00

Here is a rough, sneak peek at some very small bits of something, in the not too distant future, you will ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO PURCHASE FROM ME. Contain your excitement, lest you forget yourself!

Tim Minchin's Storm

2011-04-11T14:37:00.004-05:00

So it's a bit smug and choir-preachy, but otherwise I really really liked this, particularly where it eventually goes when it ratchets up the scale to larger issues.

I am always super-jazzed when I see animators employing a full range of after-effects tricks in their character-centric pieces. There is so much cool stuff you can do when you employ it as more than a finishing/color-correction/compositing tool. The commercial world currently has a monopoly on combining character animation and mograph techniques, but I am happy to see it being employed in more arty or narrative circles.

A piece I just finished (awaiting release at the client's discretion sometime in the next few months) has some similar leanings, specifically the grandeur possible in a naturalistic outlook. Having a lack of belief in specific supernatural or pseudo-scientific claims in no way precludes a fulfilling, ethical, thoughtful life full of wonder and and discovery. For those who know me personally or watched me work through things on my other blog last year, this will come as no surprise. It's nice to see that the ready availability of production tools and publishing platforms makes content like this possible and viewable. There are countless tv shows featuring psychics and ghost hunters and faith healers, yet there are no programs about how none of them ever deliver any hard, documented results that stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps the independent sphere is the best place to talk about that type of thing, as the money is very small.

Of course, all of this was already said by the great They Might Be Giants:

Tadly Weeklies #2

2011-04-11T12:29:00.003-05:00

Tadly is unsure of why he thought such an attempt might prove successful.

Tadly Weeklies #1

2011-04-05T04:52:00.005-05:00

Tadly didn't want to be faddish, nor did he wish to appear démodé.

Where has Tadly been?

2011-04-05T04:35:00.001-05:00

About 11 months ago, we introduced Tadly Waldorfington and his friend Abigail Addams. We had been planning it for about 4 months, and I spent April of 2010 making this episode right here, with some help from friends for extra voices:

We were very excited to make it. We were very excited to show it. We were very excited to introduce the handmade plush Tadlies and Abigails. Soon after, we introduced Tadly at shows and started spreading the word. Lots and lots of people were very into the idea and jazzed about what we were trying to do. We followed up with two more shorts throughout the year:

Notice how the end of that clip promises "Episode 1" in August? We have always envisioned the animated series to be split into the short Abigail episodes and the longer, numbered adventure episodes. Well, that didn't happen. What happened were some job problems which lead to a few grey hairs on our young heads, which took our focus off of Tadly. I worked on and off through the fall, but some external issues left me unable to complete the first proper episode of our little series. We'd go to shows and tell people about it and they were super excited and supportive, and then we'd have nothing new to show them. This isn't what we had planned.

Actual storyboard sketches from the first scene of episode 1!

When things finally became stable, it was November. We decided to do a new episode of Abigail Recommends, and it became a song about being thankful. Because we were. It had been a very trying few months and we had come through it with flying colors. Hooray for us! This song will surely become a part of the burgeoning genre of Thanksgiving carols.

I realize that this is the second time in the past few weeks I've referenced and posted this video. Consider it an exercise in archiving.

But no new episode has come. This is for a few reasons:

1. We make these ourselves, between our bill-paying work of animating things and sewing squids. I am a bit of a workaholic on creative endeavors, but things had been very up in the air job-wise and an episode of Tadly takes many, many, many hours of work. It's a massive undertaking, and it was difficult to stay focused on the task at hand when we were being pulled in so many different directions.

2. Voice actors : we can't afford them, and we've had a difficult time filling the roles we had written. Also expensive : music that isn't terrible and is legal for use in a fly-by-night independent cartoon series. We have the music problem solved now, at least, and we are working on the other one as we speak.

3. I have this tendency to make everything bigger and more elaborate than it needs to be. If I come up with a funny little story, I will in 5 minutes have turned it into The Brothers Effing Karamozov in 3d Imax. I wrote an entire season outline for Tadly, complete with recurring secondary characters and an overarching plot. This made everything far more complicated, and it pushed the ambitiousness of our diy project so far past 11 that we simply couldn't get our heads around it.

4. This was secret for awhile... but oh, what the heck. I was approached last fall about pitching some animated series to (insert popular childrens network here) and for a while we thought that Tadly might be one of the ideas pitched. In the end, we realized that we would have had to change much of what we wanted to do with the little guy in order to meet (insert popular childrens network here)'s very reasonable creative mandate. Also, there was a good chance he might end up on a Burger King cup. That just tasted bad to us. We have dreams for this. We have stories, plural, that we want to tell. There's an empty niche out there we wish were filled, and Tadly is our way of doing just that. Over the trials and tribulations of last year, we grew rather attached to the little guy, as well as his best friend.

In summary, we launched this thing last spring and found out that we were in no way ready for the enormity of the task we'd set out for ourselves. So behind are we that even those who have followed our efforts have no idea how big the concept is, and all we want to do with it. That is a crying shame. And so we are going to remedy that, and I will tell you all about it right now.

We've grown a lot in the past year. Things have stabilized quite a bit for us and we have settled into the lives of freelance artists. Part of that is getting our big projects rolling along and finally taking the bull by the horns, or rather the octopus by the tentacles as it were. The biggest part of that can only be described as the return of Tadly. We're going to do this like we should have done since the beginning. This means that you can expect Tadly's facebook to be officially resurrected and updated regularly with pictures of his exploits, news of note to intrepid explorers (curated by Tadly himself), along with weekly book recommendations and reviews for students of history typed by Abigail's own paws. TadlyWaldorfington.com will be redesigned in the next few weeks. We'll be offering prints for sale in the spring which will help us along our way to the next big milestones - finishing new adventure episodes, along with a couple of smaller shorts this year and a few other surprises (perhaps a Halloween carol? Any suggestions?). Like public radio, we survive on the support of those who enjoy and believe in what we do. So watch what we do. We received a ton of interest in and questions about storybooks, and we would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to do one. I can honestly say that nothing would thrill us more. Books are very expensive to make if you want to do them well, and so we are going to save up and weigh our options. Rest assured, when a book emerges it will be something special - no cheap spiral-bound trifles for you. Beyond that, we'll be at a great many shows this year, starting next week right here in Pittsburgh at Handmade Arcade. Each show will be announced through Tadly's Facebook as they are confirmed. We were on the road almost every weekend from Halloween through Christmas in 2010, and we plan to do even more if we can this year. We traveled from Providence to Atlanta and Cleveland and St. Louis and Chicago and New York City. Like Tadly, we are travelers. There's an excellent chance we'll be in your neck of the woods, so keep your eyes peeled! In the meantime, multiple varieties of handmade Tadly and Abigail plushies are available in the shop. A new Abigail will be available starting at Handmade Arcade, and then online thereafter. There will also be some new Tadlies coming as we go ahead.

As I said before, we are doing this partly because we love the characters and want to share them with you. We have so many stories to tell you about them. Do you know the why Abigail can speak, and is named after the wife of our second president? We do. Do you know why Tadly rarely visits home? We do. Do you know of Tadly's encounter with the great ice worm? We do - and we shiver at the thought. Do you know about the mysterious tomb of Benjamin Franklin, and what may be found there on the night of the autumnal equinox? We do. Do you know what is floating in the north Atlantic?

We do. And we want to tell you.

The other reason we do this is more a matter of personal identity. Some people deal with numbers. Some are teachers, or firemen, or lawyers or farmers or builders. We are makers. We make things. Like sharks, we simply cannot stop for too long. Like sharks, we also have multiple rows of teeth and protective membranes that close over our eyes just before we strike. Like sharks, we will ruin your trip to the beach.

We want to tell you stories. We want to take you places. Come along with us.

-Scott and Bethany

PS - Oh yes, and if you are interested in being a voice actor in an upcoming Tadly episode, do not hesitate to contact us. We have no money as of yet, though there may be a free print in it for you when the time comes.

PSS - For further information on how we are like sharks, see this informative video:

snap-happy

2011-04-04T17:16:00.001-05:00

Good lord this has been a fun project. The first two of these should be up in the next week or so.

I have succumbed to a meme : The Influence Map

2011-04-02T01:50:00.018-05:00

(click for high res)

In the interest of transparency and proselytizing, as well as something to do on an enforced day off from work, I give you my influence map. I've very much enjoyed the maps of other artists, and I always find such things very interesting, especially when the artist doesn't wear their influences on their sleeve. This is also going to be a difficult exercise for me, as I'm going to try be extremely, extremely brief in my writeup. So, shall we?

1. Mike Mignola : Much has been written about Mignola's visual style - the shadows, the composition, the incredibly smart and thrifty uses of color. But beyond those takeaways, what sticks with me is his world building. Mignola creates a coherent world in which conflicting ideas of supernatural entities can all coexist, each with their spheres of influence, great and small. And he treats them all with the same respect, if not reverence. He also doesn't explain more than he should.

2. German Expressionist Cinema : The angles! The silhouettes! The dreaminess! Metropolis, Vampyr, Faust, Nosferatu, Caligari and others provide a rich vocabulary for scenery and atmosphere. Also : don't worry about making things look real. Sometimes it's better when it looks impossible.

3. The World/Inferno Friendship Society : I wanted to have some non-visual influences on this list, as they are just as important if not more so. The direct visual influences start me out in a direction, but it's the non-visual things that keep me going and more often than not inform the choice of destination. It was hard to narrow down the choices, but no band has had a bigger impact on me in the past decade than WIFS. I've personally been very slightly involved with them, having done a great deal of their merch designs for several years and a video to boot. No band is more exciting to me, and no band has aged with me so well. It's non-cynical music written by adults with a penchant for self-mythologizing and poetic fight songs. It's punk rock for people who got out of their garages and traveled the world. It's bleary-eyed optimism. It's music that says "yes".

4. Dave Quiggle : So if you were to look at my artwork from, say, 2006, you would be hard-pressed to find any influence other than Dave Quiggle and influence #13. I came across his work on christian hardcore albums in the late 90s and was blown away by the colors and the thick, tapering lines. His designs just looked so... substantial, like they were these flat, solid, heavy objects made of ink. He also shares with me some foundational influences from Mignola and iconography. I learned a lot from out-and-out faking his style in my early years, though it was long before I really thought about what I was learning so it's hard to quantify all that I took from him. In 2007 or so I began to move away from his style and started developing more of my own voice, but I can't deny that his was a foundational influence. These days you'll mainly see him in my work whenever I design a tattoo, and I hope that never completely goes away because I can't think of tattoo designs I find more attractive than his.

5. Art Deco (mainly in poster design) : The shapes! The optimism! The refusal to treat progress as something laughably impossible! The future is ours! Doing things not because they are easy, but because they are hard! Onward! Look at how huge that building is! Look at how awesome these zeppelins are!

6. Yann Tiersen : I won't lie - 9 times out of 10 when I am making a cartoon, I wish beyond wishing that I could have Yann Tiersen score it. Actually, 9 times of 10 when I do ANYTHING, I want him to score it. For me, listening to his music is one of those rare occasions where listening to instrumental music makes you want to live in such a way that it mirrors the feeling you get from the music, if that makes any sense.

7. Video Games : For those of us who grew up with little to no exposure to art and music, video games were a fine introduction to a variety of styles of illustration and electronic music. For example, I have recordings on my computer of music from old Mega Man games not because I'm reveling in nerd-dom, but because I honestly grew to love the melody from the Magnet Man stage when I was young. It's hard to narrow down the specific takeaways from such a huge and broad influence, but I'm going to have to pinpoint games like Out Of This World (or Another World, for our friends abroad). Games like this have a very distinct sense of place, and the side-scrolling view is still what I tend to default to when setting up a scene. I never seem to tire of it and often have to force myself to break out of it, which is something I'm thankfully doing more of now. Out Of This World also had this wonderful visual style - all big chunks of color, and again with the heavy silhouettes. That game put you in a place and told you nothing about it but what you could discover by traveling it, and I still vividly recall playing through it in 8th grade. I may have liked other games more or played others longer, but this game was the first that popped into my head as an honest-to-goodness influence.

8. Henry Selick : You'd think that with Henry Selick and German Expressionist Movies on my list that I'd like Tim Burton, but honestly I can't think of anything interesting that guy has done in the past decade and a half. I find him to be a more interesting art director than a writer/director, and even his art direction got old to me back in the 90s. I mean, I don't think 90-degree angles are especially oppressive, and I though I was a skinny misfit as a child I actually rather enjoyed the time we lived in a planned suburban subdivision. Anyway, back to Selick. He directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (not Tim Burton!) as well as my personal favorite animated movie of the past several decades, Coraline. Coraline is, as far as I am concerned, a near-perfect movie. James and The Giant Peach : also visually masterful. Did you know he also directed the stop-motion effects in The Life Aquatic, and was very close to directing The Fantastic Mr. Fox? Oh wait, we'll get to that later. I also love that his new production company has this in their press release - "a new stop-motion company whose mandate is to make great, scary films for young ‘uns with a small, tight-knit crew who watch each other’s backs." Can I have that job?

9. Iconography : I was a very devout Christian for most of my life. I am not anymore. I was raised protestant, and so there was never anything close to saint-veneration in my life. I inherited a large painting of Jesus from my great-grandfather, and that's that closest we got to such things. However, in my late teens I discovered the world of iconography and fell in love with it. When I was first married, my wife and I would hang out at the Catholic store at the local small-town mall and just pour through the liturgical art. There is something about the way people try to capture divinity, importance, gravity and reverence in these flat images that really grabs me. You can see this influence all over my work. Icons are some of the least apathetic works of art I've ever seen. I love the use of shorthand symbols like the halo, or the hand signals for peace and blessing, and the strange things that get lost in translation like the animal symbols for the apostles, the initials that I still have trouble nailing down, the heavenly rays of divinity. I also dig the flatness. This is art that is trying to communicate something that many believers consider too high and lofty to be communicated by anything other than God himself. But hey, it never hurts to try.

10. Wes Anderson : Full disclosure - I can't stand movies that are heavily influenced by Wes Anderson. That said, I am one those people who make things that are influenced by him. I am DOOMED. The obvious takeaways for me have been his composition and usage of color, along with his very flat staging (again with the flatness! I am all about flatness, it seems). I have a soft-spot for visual direction that mimics what one might see in a theater, and Anderson's movies always have this feeling that they are not taking place in the real world, but in an elaborately staged production of the real world. There's a distance and an artifice in the look of his films, but where someone like Kubrick (whom I love as well) gives me this dispassionate "humanity in a terrarium" feeling, Anderson gives me an empathetic "humanity in a lovingly-made diorama" feel. There is a humanity in these films, however stylized. Many people who are inspired by Anderson only take his "quirky irony" but miss the empathy. They forget to care about the characters. On the visual front, I aspire to be so meticulous in my art direction. I inherited a litany of my favorite ways create a shot from him. Want to count the amount of slow tracking shots in my cartoons? How about the straight-on-face shot of someone blinking? The Royal Tenenbaums is my favorite movie of all time, depending on when you ask me, and Rushmore and The Fantastic Mr Fox (which deserves a full post of its own) are each up there as well. It also helps that my own preferred sense of humor is dry and understated. I think my friend Kev once referred to the quiet comedic tone of Wes Anderson as "PBS funny". I'll take that.

11. Mystery Science Theater 3000 : Continuing a theme here, my love of MST3K has little to do with ironic enjoyment of bad movies. It's about formulating your own reaction to what you are seeing. It's about being proactive and never passively watching. It's about talking back. It's about laughing at everything. It's about taking a miserable situation and choosing to make something great out of it. It's about making puppets out of junk and hot glue and creating one of the greatest things of all time with no budget to speak of. Oh, and the show is also incredibly hilarious. ROWSDOWER!

12. Early 20th Century Halloween Illustrations : This is kind of oddly specific and esoteric, but it's a little sub-genre of illustration that has been incredibly influential on me. Something about the way the culture treated all things occult and spooky at the time, mixed with the prevailing illustration style does something to my brain that I can't quite explain. Go on a search through flickr, specifically for vintage Halloween postcards and magazine covers. You'll be glad you did.

13. Becky Cloonan : In 2001, I discovered Ms. Cloonan's excellent indie-comic "Social Unrest". I sent $20 and received two xeroxed zine-like volumes of this angsty, inky, post-punky comic. Since then she has gone on to fame and fortune in the comic world with Demo and other such things. I love love love the way she draws people and skulls and trees. Hers was another big influence on my younger years that has been diluted in recent times, though I still follow her work blog religiously.

14. Chris Ware : Of course I am influenced by Ware. Of course. From him the confidence to go simple, and go with my own vision of the world, as opposed to the vision of the world I wished I had. I spent so many years trying to emulate other illustrators, but in the end I was still most comfortable making characters out of simple shapes- round heads, round ears, pointy noses, etc. Reading Chris Ware gave me permission to just go with it. There is nothing wasted in his art. Every line does the work of ten of mine. He regularly tackles some of the most complex human experiences and ideas with mind-blowing clarity. Above all, I think that it is this ability to organize information visually that I wish to emulate. His pages contain the most complex and diagrammatic sequential storytelling artwork I have ever encountered. I have a long-time love of extremely complex diagrams and flowcharts, particularly when the creators take the time to organize them in an aesthetically pleasing way. Like the aforementioned Kubrick and Anderson, Ware's style can come off as cold and removed (something he regards as a failing), but perhaps I'm just cold and removed because it connects with me on some very deep level. Every artist who wishes to tell stories can learn something from Chris Ware.

15. John Hodgman : Speaking of permission-givers, John Hodgman's books were a revelation to me, as if I'd found some sort of hidden lunch table where all the kids like me sit. Other people find a standup album that gets them into comedy, or a novel that helps define them. I found fake almanacs. Also, as I've said countless times, do yourself a favor and listen to the audiobook of The Areas of My Expertise on a really long car ride. The section on the states is worth the price of admission all by itself. Hey! He played the dad in Coraline! And he was on Battlestar Galactica! And the Daily Show! Note : I have a similar build to John Hodgman, and similar hair and I also wear glasses. This is all actually purely coincidental. I'm not trying to emulate the man that hard.

16. This American Life : Ira Glass is the only man that I've ever had any sort of crush on. Seriously. He's just the best. I often feel somewhat alienated from the community of animators, many of whom want to follow in the grand traditions of Disney or Looney Toons or Pixar or John K or their favorite anime, and they want to tell stories that follow in this tradition. I applaud them and love watching such things, but my goals for storytelling are hopelessly influenced by my years of religiously listening to This American Life. Among adults, a self-insulating cynicism that borders on misanthropy is extremely common. Ira Glass produces a show that is eternally curious about humanity, endlessly interested in their experiences, and filled with such deep empathy for all manner of people. It's a show that consistently gives a damn. There's no hip apathy or self-aggrandizing nihilism here. Their forays into investigative journalism actually seek to address problems and make the world a better place. There's always something else to explore if you're willing to make the trip. I'm an obsessive overthinker, and no other program has made me think and feel so much. It also introduced me to David Sedaris, David Rackoff, Sarah Vowell, and oh yeah - John Hodgman has contributed several times, as has Chris Ware. Small world. When I think of what I'd like to do, if I had time and resources to do whatever I'd want, I inevitably come back to the types of stories that owe more to fiction and nonfiction you'd hear on This American Life than, say, Walt Disney.

17. Early Animation : Well, I mean, look at how I draw people. This is the obvious influence. Beyond that, I start to lose interest in the old animated shorts when they stop being somewhat surreal and based on an ongoing rhythm. My two favorite old-timey shorts are Bimbo's Initiation and Jack Frost, which is pictured above. After we hit the 40s or so, things get so codified and smooth that I start to check out. I prefer it when things don't even attempt to look real, when the trees bob up and down to the music in the background, when cars walk instead of roll. I also like how cartoons of this period had a predilection for the spooky and dangerous and sometimes downright incomprehensible. Also, it was the golden age of background art as far as I am concerned. Go watch Jack Frost and marvel at the colors and the fields as autumn ends and winter rolls in. Fleischer's rotograph! Mindblowing! It's all up in the air, it's all experimental, and none of it is stuffy. Many of these cartoons are almost a century old, making them almost mythical in and of themselves.

Alright, so that's done. Some of you artist-types should do one of these too. I'd love to see what you're into and what made you the people you are today.

Done and done.

2011-03-25T23:29:00.002-05:00

Well, it was a very busy 6 weeks, but it's finally done. It's one of several projects I've been working on since early February, and completing it means I get to sleep with some regularity from here on out.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to show it to you. I hope it is very soon. I think you'll like it, or rather I really hope you do.

Until then, onward and upward!

Dashboard Hula

2011-03-24T06:02:00.001-05:00

Very, very soon you'll get to see some of these in full, glorious color.

Swimming Properly

2011-03-17T06:27:00.001-05:00

The least effective doggy paddle in the world.

Train Station

2011-03-15T14:27:00.001-05:00

Make Mine PLAGIARISM.

2011-03-14T23:15:00.007-05:00

Apparently Disney is adding another themed area to their parks : TOTAL EFFING RIP OFF LAND.

The evidence?

Check out these these two still from the upcoming Disney flick The Ballad Of Nessie:

And now, watch this:

That, of course is our entry into the Thanksgiving carol canon, Ghost Pilgrims. I'm sure you are stamping your little feet in outrage as well. "Outrageous!" you cry. "Damnable!" you scream! You throw open your window and call into the howling night wind "MIGHTY GOD WHY?" But no answer comes. No, my dears, no one can give a sufficient answer to this most basic of questions : Why is Disney ripping off my plaid hills?

How can they, a multi-national giant of entertainment, and the bearer of perhaps the richest tradition of 2d animation in existence, justify this outrage? Are they so out of ideas that they must descend into the back-alley world of indie animators who make sporadically-updated cartoon series featuring themselves as a talking octopus and their wives as a talking cat? Next they'll be ripping off my signature innovations of "squash and stretch", "overlapping action" and "talkies".

This is almost as terrible as when they, making only minor changes, lifted my ideas for "The Autocrat's New Schtick", "Disney Princess: Port of Call New Orleans" and "The Ugly Dachshund". They even ganked my treatments for "Angela Lansbury & Flying Bed Vs. The Nazi Menace" and "Car Full of Gnomes".

Pictured: Their unlicensed take on my script "The District Attorney is Too Shaggy".

Finding Solutions

2011-03-14T05:09:00.003-05:00

For the longest time I've been trying to come up with a quick and dirty way to share little motion clips from in-progress projects. As such, I have turned to the bleeding-edge tech of ANIMATED GIFS. Doing it this way is quick, easy, fun to look at and doesn't spoil the final impression. Also : savable and embeddable! Share them with friends! It also gives the clips an interesting and wholly separate aesthetic that actually reflects the fact that everything I make is made at home, by myself. DIY till you die from it!

Transmission from Mars

2011-03-13T00:31:00.002-05:00

My boards are horrifyingly ugly, Part 3

2011-03-11T09:43:00.004-05:00

The board:

The finished frame:

My brain is about to just quit from exhaustion. I can actually feel it thinking worse. It's making that noise you hear when the washing machine is thrown off balance.

My boards are horrifyingly ugly, Part 2

2011-02-28T09:32:00.003-05:00

The board:

The finished frame:

Bambi, humans are basically good.

2011-02-26T20:59:00.004-05:00

Hey, next time you need to do a quick and dirty 16 frame gallop cycle in After Effects, feel free to use this handy reference. You don't even need to credit me! WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY.

My boards are horrifyingly ugly.

2011-02-17T04:01:00.002-05:00

The board:

The finished frame:

Making Things : Olde Jersey and the One Minute Project.

2011-02-12T22:44:00.019-05:00

So I was prepping an entry on the various ways I have animated water over the years, as it's something I've received some comments on and wanted to talk a bit about it. Maybe I will at some point, but I got distracted by something I found while looking for the project file for Man And Cat At The End Of The World. Then I thought it would be fun to do a post every once in awhile, similar to the wrap up posts I do after a project, but more about the general process of making things.

So, would you like to see the first attempt I ever made at an animated short in After Effects?

Of course you would.

This little piece of whimsy hails from early 2008. You can really tell how impressed I was by the end credits of A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Oh, those credits. The design, the motion, the music - they're still so perfect and even better than the movie before them. They were worth the ticket price all by themselves.

I had been using After Effects for about a year prior, mainly as a post-production space for the cartoons I was still making in Flash. FLASH! I would kick out an .avi using swf2video, and then load it into After Effects for color correction and yes, lens flares. But it wasn't until 2008 that I began really using AE in earnest as a production tool. It was so incredibly liberating to be working with the software and I immediately wanted to make a short using my new found knowledge.

In late 2007 I had attempted a webcomic. I laugh at this now. Comics are something I don't read a ton of, aside from the work of Mike Mignola and Chris Ware. My wife is burning through Fables as well but I haven't picked it up yet. I didn't grow up reading comics and have zero interest in superheroes, aside from the occasional Batman book and of course The Watchmen. But for some reason I thought I could pull off a long-term comic, with all the craft, skill and dedication that entails. I was very wrong, but the concept behind the comic was interesting enough to stick with me.

It was called Olde Jersey, an obvious play on my beloved home state. It took place in a seaside city and concerned various residents, from starving artists to corrupt officials. There was Mingus, a struggling artist trying to make his rent and pay protection money to a hulking prairie dog. A run in with that same prairie dog has resulted in a fractured skull, and afterward Mingus would sometimes see the spirits of the dead. There was Anya, a first-generation immigrant from eastern Europe whose family had fled this universe's version of the Bolsheviks. And then there was Brunswick, a crow who belonged to an all-bird anarchist cell called The Daylights. He was young and wide-eyed, all hopped up on revolutionary rhetoric and ready to burn the whole city to the ground. The principle storyline was to involve Brunswick, Mingus and Anya becoming friends and finding themselves embroiled in a plot by The Daylights to blow up a cafe in which the mayor and his college friend (who happened to be the head of a local band of thieves) routinely met. Visually, it was my (very rough) take on doing a gritty, penny-dreadful version of the world you saw in old Fleischer and Van Buren studio cartoons- animals with big heads and notched pupils in this fantasy early 20th-century environment. I even did it in a faux-sepia tone palette. It was a cool idea and I would still love to do it as a cartoon, though I'd probably need some foolhardy network to finance the damn thing and we all know that's not going to happen. Oh, you're interested in seeing some pages? Alright then.

Oh lord. The writing. The artwork.
Hey! There's some water! This post IS on topic!
This is Mingus, standing in for me as an impoverished artist. I like that owl.
I was very into vernacular dialogue. Still am.

After running for about 35 pages, I had to admit that I wouldn't be able to carry a comic out. I was pretty bummed, as were the three people or so who humored me and read it. But the next spring when I was looking for something to make in After Effects, I thought of doing little vignettes based in Olde Jersey. "Fishing" was to be the first, and it would chronicle the passing along of a cursed ring that meant certain doom for whomever it was given to. It had been on the finger of a young bride who cast herself into the sea after her fiance drowned. As she sank, the devil changed her into a fish and doomed her to eternally swim, coughing up the ring when caught and swallowing it again when it found it's way from the cold hand of it's wearer back to the sea. The clip up top was the first section of six. Again, a neat idea. Again, too much to handle at the time. And it just kinda sat on my hard drive, mocking me for a good year and a half afterward. For me, there are few things more discouraging than setting out a bid project for which I am excited and then finding that for some reason I can't continue it. At the time, I felt as though I'd never be able to complete anything, let alone this Olde Jersey thing which had now twice overwhelmed me.

This brings me more or less to the point of this entry. It wasn't until late 2009, when I had been laid off from my studio job, that I sat down and made Man And Cat At The End Of The World. The moderate success it achieved online spurred me on to keep making original shorts and that has basically gotten me what career I have today. I am indebted to everyone who commented and emailed and re-posted it - you made me think I could make things. But I also learned something very important, in regards to personal projects - make them small. There's a popular thing that Nick Campbell over at GreyScaleGorilla does called Five Second Projects. Those kids are all slick and glossy and 4d, so they can make something awesome in 5 seconds. I need a bit longer, so I have my One Minute Projects. The goal is to make something one minute long. One minute is easy, but substantial enough to be engrossing. A one minute piece has the chance of becoming something that stands on it's own. Sometimes they end up being 30 seconds. Sometimes they're over a minute. But they always get done once I commit to them (with one notable exception, which you'll find at the bottom of this entry). The World/Inferno video Please My Favorite Don't Be Sad was a One Minute Project, as were Rebranding and On The Subject Of Depression. What Man and Cat taught me, and what each One Minute Project thereafter has reminded me of, is that completing something is the best way to ensure you'll complete something else. I need to figure out the latin, engrave it on a plaque and hang it right over my workstation. So my advice for just about anyone who wants make something for themselves, or to give to others, is to go for quality over quantity. Make a great short film instead of an okay longer one. Do one minute of the best animation you can muster as opposed to 5 minutes that you know you'll never get through. Simple is best. If it's a complicated idea, figure out how to do it in a simple manner. There are amazing people who can crank out long-form awesomeness with alarming regularity. I am not one of them. If you are like me, then I can only recommend that you also put together a One Minute Project of your own, show it to other people and see what happens. In the end, if you're like me, you'll look back and see a variety of interesting, completed pieces as opposed to one gargantuan, unwieldy project that sits on your hard drive reminding you that you'll never finish it and you'll never finish anything because you're not talented enough and that you should probably just go back to playing Civilization 5 because it will always be there for you. Civilization 5 always love you.

Oh, as far as the One Minute Project I never completed, it was a sparse, minimalist piece about something I experience called Time-Space Synaesthesia. I actually thought everyone visualized and experienced time this way, and while my wife has spent the last few years assuring me that most people do not, it took me actually reading some articles about it to convince me that it wasn't as common as I thought. At least it answered why I have such great anecdotal memory. So I thought I'd make a little video to explain my experience with it. What a super interesting concept! And you know what? It was super boring. I thought that working with no characters, almost no color and no whimsy would be an interesting change. No sir. I imagine for the viewer this is like watching someone's vacation slides if they took a trip to County Solipsism for the annual feast of Look-At-Me-Aren't-I-Interesting. Well, you can judge for yourself by watching this never-to-be-completed video.

So I supposed the second lesson learned is to know when to stop. Know when you're not going to finish something and just kill it and move on. Save the idea for a later date and make it better, or recycle parts of it for something else. Or maybe just dredge them up for a blog post. I'd love to see the unfinished, rough, and otherwise killed projects from the artists and animators I adore.

Oh, and I should mention that the music in these videos was done by Yann Tiersen and Penguin Club Cafe, respectively. They are both absolutely fantastic and you should track them down.

Group Think

2011-02-07T03:51:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty well booked until mid- April on two very cool projects for two very cool clients. Consequently, I won't be able to post much from each until they are done. But oh, what the heck. We'll do a frame or two every once in awhile. You'll also definitely dig the post-mortems on both of them.

Unsolicited Advice #3

2011-01-21T20:23:00.001-05:00

Indeed.

Unsolicited Advice #2

2011-01-20T19:25:00.007-05:00

Beware confirmation bias!

Unsolicited Advice #1

2011-01-20T14:50:00.003-05:00

You are welcome.