Category — Filmmaking

I really wanted to be able to hammer out the last of the pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′ this weekend.  However, as I’m starting to go through the various scenes I’ve already penciled out, sequencing the drawings and seeing them as a movie rough draft, I’m discovering there’s a lot of… hmmm, what’s the word… “sweetening” that needs to happen.  You know, extra drawings to make the scene pop.  Or at least make it look less stupid.  Not surprisingly, a lot of new drawings involve globs of slobber and sweat flying around, with the occasional eyeball popping out.  It’s animation.  What did you expect?

So, we’re looking at one, possibly two more weeks of pencil sketches…

My problem is, there’s a schedule, and schedules must be adhered to.  Schedules are the holy engine that drives our commerce, makes the trains run on time, etcetera etcetera… too bad my ability to accurately judge the amount of time I need to spend on any given activity is pathetically underdeveloped and almost completely useless.  Didn’t you ever wonder how come I never EVER put down a release date for a project?  It’s because I have no… freakin’… idea.  None.  Anyway, having long ago recognized my bizarre inability to guess these things, I always load whatever schedule I devise with tons of buffer time, so technically I’m still on schedule.  Sort of.  Kind of.  It’s done when it’s done.  Leave it at that…

Have a great St. Patty’s Day.  But don’t drink any of that green beer.  That’s just nasty…

This is the final week of pencil drawings for ‘Scary Monster 2′.  I have this entire week’s drawing efforts scheduled out, and so far I’ve been able to get everything done I’ve planned on.  A minor miracle, I must admit… anyway, I have Sunday as the final day, and then we move on to inking.  Aren’t you thrilled?  Aren’t you excited???  The toughest phase is nearly done, just two more to go…

First official soccer practice is this Thursday.  I hope the girls haven’t forgotten everything they learned last year over the winter break…

From the desk of our shameless self-promotion staff (read: me) and our partners at Zazzle.com, I humbly present some fine new hats for your approval and, hopefully, purchase:

Cute, aren’t they? I have ideas for some t-shirts, mousepads and other stuff; you can go to the new Goodies page and check things out as they become available. Thank you for your support.

As always, comments welcome!

Real Life is such a jokester.  I planned on spending my weekend zipping around Omaha like a gypsy, toting Little Miss Hoopster from game to game for her basketball tournament.  And then, wouldn’t ya know it, the little twerp comes down with THE FLU.  Sky-high temps, looking like a train hit her, and just like that we’re chained to the domicile, pumping all sorts of fever-reducing drugs into her, visiting the doctors at Urgent Care, happy stuff like that.  

But wait — there’s more…  The Disease Queen, being the kind and giving soul that she is, decided not to hoard the virus fun all to herself, so guess who has the bug now?  Go on, guess…

Thanks, hon.  Nice to see you’re looking out for your old man…

Seriously, though, the lack of a tournament freed up the weekend enough to let me tackle one of the most difficult scenes for the ‘Scary Monster’ short.  I’m really starting to get comfortable using the Wacom to pencil the inbetween frames, which speeds things up considerably (no more fighting with tracing paper or digitizing drawings).  I’m hoping someday the paper thing will be necessary only for general sketching, and all my keyframes can be done direct with Painter.  Then I can concentrate on actually learning how to draw… 

The rest of the week I have plans to finish up all the pencil drawings for the remaining scenes.  Most are pretty simple, but there is one more big, bad, scary scene that I’m sure will make me totally crazy.  I lose this weekend to a trip to Kansas City, so whatever I do, I have to do it before Friday.  Could get interesting…

Happy Leap Year! Earlier this month, I sat down and wrote out a shooting schedule for the next “Scary Monster” installment. One of the goals was to finish drawing and shooting all pencil roughs by the 2nd of March. Doesn’t look like I’m going to hit that goal — there are waaaay more drawings than I had anticipated, and I’m losing my next two weekends to Real Life things. Fortunately, I put some extra buffer in the schedule for just this scenario, so overall I’m still looking good.

I’m hoping next week to put up a test animation of a couple of scenes from the roughs.  If not next week, then the following week for sure.  I’ve got thirteen out of twenty-one scenes shot, so if all goes well I should be inking by the end of next week.  Woo hoo.