JACKFACES

Rebecca and I watched all of LOST in like five weeks so we wouldnt miss out on the ending!! Here is my tribute to LOST. Or mainly my tribute to the main character's weird face:

oh yeah! adventure time!

Oh right I should probably say something about this on my blog. This past month, I left NYC and my favorite show The Venture Bros. :(


...for LA to work on Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time With Finn and Jake"! It's been a big bowl of culture-shock since then but boy howdy I'm having a lot of fun and learning a lot of new stuff. This show has a talented and dedicated staff, every day it seems like I meet another genius. It officially comes out on April 5th but they're showing preview episodes on CN now. I really like the show- the designs, color and timing are really crazy and the humor isn't condescending, sarcastic or mean- it's prob the most earnest kid's show I've seen.

I'm getting settled out here so expect more posts soon. New comics are coming, too! Sadly I think nockFORCE is done so I need a new project.

please understand me

GastroPhobia

Today I did a guest strip for the webcomic GastroPhobia. Go look!

Here are some sketches I did to warm up

snow sketchy

snow!

sketchy sketchy

(slightly) new reel

It's got clips of the Moby video and a new project for the BBC4. Everything else is pretty much the same but I trimmed the fat here and there. Music's the same too.

Welp! That's all I have to show!

Sing of joy, sing about a boy! Little hero Astro Boy!

can't stop watching this

i have a need to cut loose!!!

okay let's animate something straight ahead with no planning!!



YEAH! Have a good new year see you in 2010

post-it green geek

"uguu!"
/

The Midriffs

EDIT: OMG THIS IS THE ONE HUNDREDTH POST ON THIS BLOG! 100!!!!! Yeah



sassy and pink!

theyre 5 cool teens looking for fun!

and they've got a passionable for all things fashionable!

-------------------

here's their original appearance in this goofy video i animated almost 2 years ago:



(in the original they had no lower bodies.)

SPEAKING OF FACEBOOK:
i know that keeping up with a blog is like so 2006. so you can now follow this blog on facebook!! so you dont have to keep checking back! Click the "Networked Blogs" widget over on the right hand column of this blog. (can I possibly say "blog" any more times in this paragraph? blog blog blog)

THE VENTURE BROS: Pinstripes and Poltergeists

Whaaaat? Season Finale already? That doesn't make sense at all, how can this be the Season Finale!? Oh. That's because it's not. It's just the end of the first "half". Half. Half-season. Half-Season Finale.

Whaaaat? Half-Season Finale already? No time to waste let's do this thing!

Bored Monarchs.

There's a crazy part in this episode that I don't have any drawings of- I directed a sequence with the Monarch-mobile flying around and stuff. And eMation made the vehicle CG! What!!! That was crazy! I should just start putting notes like "please make this CG and really awesome" on the X-Sheets somewhere.

Now here's some sarcastic Monarchs.
Dr. Girlfriend and 21.
EXTREME LIP-BITING
Henchman Eye Theory:
No floating eyebrows!! This aint Garfield.
Mask eyeholes changing shape = yes!
Brow-indents and stress marks around the eyeholes = OK!
Blinking eyeholes = surprisingly yes, this is ok sometimes. I know, weird right?

Hm... ok really it's just floating eyebrows that are verboten I guess. Well that's an important rule.

Okay! Hope you enjoyed this ep! It was pretty great I think. As always, credit to the many writers, designers, storyboard artists, revisionists, colorists, background artists, and everyone else who's work I piggyback off of. Also the three other animation directors(Kimson Jen and Nick) who I split this job with.

Also this is the second time I've mentioned this but you should check out Shivers DeStephano's blog to see what the full boards look like if you haven't already.

It's been a fun half-season. If I have the time I'll def try to do this for the back eight.

Idaho Gajendra

this is an old character i'm takin another crack at




also, here's some of tonight's brush warm-ups:

mr foonble

THE VENTURE BROS: The Better Man

Okay so we're back after a lil hiatus. LET'S GO!


First up, some Orpheus. He's been scarce this season but finally we get to draw him! Here he is, putting one of those tall candles in the ground. Also Triana.


Publick acted out those top three drawings for me, it was hilarious. I tried to make the facial expressions wide-eyed instead of seductive. The Master is just having fun. And teaching O a valuable lesson.


Teleportation effects! Yeah!! They look badass!!


Until they fall on their face!


Misc. bits and pieces.

Hope you enjoyed the episode!!! Storyboard artists and revisionists pulled thru bigtime as always, there's some really good effects and monsters and all that fun stuff.

Monsterrrrrrs

the puffball bros.

THE VENTURE BROS: Self-Medication NO-POST?!

No pictures this week! Sorry I just don't have the material. This is not a bad thing. The job of "animation director" is all about adapting a storyboard to the inflexibility of time. The storyboard needs tweaking because of this(tho I am not in the business of "fixing" boards, the board revisionists do that). In addition to timing out all of the action, I "plus" boards so the acting and emoting reads better onscreen.

The latest episode of Venture Bros, "Self-Medication", needed pretty much no plus-ing. It's probably one of the most amazing boards from this season, rife with specific character acting and well-composed shots. I added some stuff but it's nothing compared to the rest of the board. Yes it's that good, so I have nothing to show!!

While you're here though you should go to Siobahn DeStefano's blog, she's posted up some boards from this season and you should check em out! theyre awesome!!

Museum Weekend

on a completely unrelated and much less classy note I found some weird moby drawings, they were planning for that music video.

THE VENTURE BROS: The Revenge Society

Let's go! Yeah! Let's do it! Phantom Limb's getting his revenge this week! Revenge!

Best thing about council of 13 scenes: they're silhouettes! all you gotta do is "head tilt left" and "head nods" and stuff. Until the lights turn on and the dudes get clotheslined. Ouch!

FIGHT SCENE! This part went by quick but this move was cool right? I hope so! I drew these poses for it!

We usually shy away from those corny too-much-anticipation-animationy-Don Bluthesque-"acting" poses but Sgt. Hatred's personality calls for them. Jennifer Batinich Martinez-Joffre (one of the other animation directors, and newly married!!) animated the best Hatred stuff in the past so I look to her scenes for reference.

Some Hanks! Trying my hardest to make him angsty and rebellious.

MISC! Two heads ARE better than one!

as always, super props to the board artists and revisionists. on the shoulders of giants.

Hope you liked the ep! YEAH! VENTURE BROS!

Moby- One Time We Lived (music video)

Earlier this year i took a job doing some short animations for Moby with Robert Powers. those seemed to go over well because Moby asked us to return and animate full music videos! This is the one I worked on:



I was tasked with animating the dancing cycles but was given the restriction of making it fit within a more simple, "flash-puppety" style. It was a tight deadline, and doing flash puppets and making them look good is difficult. I'd rather just do new off-model drawings than slide elements around. eventually I ended up just animating the dancing normally and then cleaning them up so that they'd look like flash puppetry. the most fun part of this was animating the transitions between cycles. the face was then just added on top. (i did the lipsync and facial expressions as well)