John wastes paper

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION DEPT: All I have time for tonight is this crappy sketch of bad Beatles caricatures and a random snooty face. But, the cintiq is feeling a bit more comfortable for casual sketching like this. Using the charcoal brush in photoshop.

A burger and some doodles whilst listening to the new Beatles biography, "Tune In", by Mark Lewisohn. Maybe that's why some of these look a bit Beatle-ish with their turtleneck shirts. I particularly like the droopy-eyed gents at the top of the bag. I may use them for something :) Blue ballpoint pen on a MacDonald's bag.

Here are some action analysis notes I made for myself from a short clip of Family Dog. No fancy drawing here. Said dog has just been tricked into running out the front door of the family's house, which is being robbed. I was interested in breaking down the mechanics of this fast 4-legged run. I was fascinated by the simple shapes that describe the motion and all the bits and pieces that drag and overlap. I do a lot of these frame-by-frame studies for relaxation. That's not strange, is it? These were drawn on cheap copy paper with a ballpoint pen.

I'm endlessly fascinated by the acting choices in the original Family Dog episode of Amazing stories - I think they are, well, amazing. Don't believe me? Here, go take a look for  yourself!  Here are some old study sketches I did of a scene I particularly liked. No fancy drawing here - just analyzing the shot :) The family's house has just been robbed and the Dad character is laying it down on the dog. I was analyzing the pacing of the acting, which was broken into six phrases. The dialogue is "We don't expect too much from you, do we? Not really, no. All we expect is for you to be a dog, which means you eat, and sleep, and occasionally keep the stupid house from getting robbed!" I love the pacing and texture of the acting - it goes from quick, mocking sarcasm to a slow, deliberate accounting of points, and back to a quick build-up of anger - 387 frames of goodness :) Also, take a look at what the animator is doing with the Dad's mouth shapes. Excep

Recently I've rediscovered my passion for drawn animation, and so I've been learning this program called Flipbook – look it up , it's great! Along with using a Cintiq monitor to draw on, it's as close as you'll get to animating traditionally on a computer. As a warm-up I scribbled these two cycles. Heh, drawing on a computer screen still feels a bit funny, but I'm getting used to it. This first one, of course, is a Christmas elf. It is December, after all :) And this next one is just a standard run cycle. Nothing fancy here. Just trying to get used to the tools. I hear that, before they decided to ditch drawn animation all together, that the Disney Studio seriously considered outfitting their animators on the Pooh Movie with Flipbook and Cintiqs as a way of speeding up production. There was a certain amount of good logic to that because you can instantly flip your drawings and view them in motion, in addition to copy and pasting trace-back portions, etc

These are a few random storyboard panels from what would have been the opening sequence to an educational Albert & Einstein cartoon. Einstein obviously has a very vivid inner-life :) These were drawn with ball point pen and prisma color pencil on color copy paper, 8.25" x 4.25". And here are some test renders of the in-progress models of Albert and Einstein. When the project was cancelled I never bothered to finish and rig them - poor Einstein never even got any hands! Maybe one of these days for fun :) 

MORE OLD STUFF DEPT: These are probably from around 2000 or 2001. This is what started the Albert & Einstein line of educational materials that the California Department of Water Resources provides to the public. Its goal is water safety education and has been very popular since it was first published – probably because it's FREE :)  It's been reprinted and updated several times over the years; and the character drawings have been updated as well, as I've gained more skill delineating funny, cartoony animals. These are the production boards, which in themselves tells you how long ago the book was produced. No one does paste-up on boards any more, and the last time we reprinted I digitized the whole thing. These drawings were all done slightly oversized on bristol board and inked with a felt tip marker. I'm still not happy with a lot of this and will probably revise some of it the next time it's reprinted :)

OLD STORYBOARD WORK DEPT: No, that title is not a dig at the client. Just an acknowledgement that, years ago when I took on this freelance assignment, I really did not have the time in my schedule for it and the work suffered. And for that I apologize to Todd Popple of Plus Plus Productions, who graciously hired me for this project and many others before it. Todd's client wanted a computer animated television spot for their pesticide business, and I was hired to build the 3D assets and animate them. I suggested that a good starting point for production would be these boards; to define what needed to be built and to have the camera work and compositions pre-approved by the client. Unfortunately, by the time the boards were approved I had run out of free time to animate the spot. My day job was taking up too much of my evenings and weekends for something as ambitious as this. At the time I assumed that Todd and the client would move on to another animator to take over, but I'm

COPY WHAT YOU ADMIRE DEPT: ' Just going through some old sketchbooks and thought I'd post these notes on characters and animation I made from observations of Brad Bird's Family Dog episode of Amazing Stories. I've always loved its quirky character designs and fluid, cartoony animation. These next two sketches are character studies for a short scene I was going to animate. Like a lot of projects, I never got around to finishing this one :) And this last one – heh, I just like Flash Gordon :)