(left to right) Bill Plympton, Manny Galán, ASIFA-East President David Levy, Alan Goodman, Dana Galin, Eric Homan, Fred Seibert, Diane Kredensor

Well, kind of… David Levy, the head of ASIFA East wrote this trenchant analysis of my series on his blog. Coming from a guy who runs the biggest animation organization on the east coast and has won awards for his own films, it was an honor to get such a positive appraisal of my work.

But Levy is a man who gives honest opinions about the artform he knows well, and like Mike Tyson, he held back no punches on what he thought of my cartoon about …Mike Tyson.

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Many creators owe their start in the biz to Mr. Fred Seibert who has spawned oodles of opportunities for pitchers through his initiatives at Cartoon Network/Hanna Barbera (What-A-Cartoon!) and Frederator (Oh-Yeah! Cartoons and Random Cartoons). Dan Meth arrived on the scene in 1999 and gradually made a name for himself through his internet cartoons. Fred hired Dan Meth in March of 2006, and they both began to search for ways to work with one another on original content. Eventually they came up a groundbreaking idea; the creation of 39 shorts called The Meth Minute, conceived and directed by Meth, to be posted consecutively over 39 weeks.

They unveiled their series with a certified phenomenon called, Internet People. It was a very shrewd beginning for the series because it basically summed up the history of pop culture as spread on the internet while at the same time placing the Meth Minute within that context. The short got millions of hits and lots of attention on various media. As a film, Internet People owes a lot of its success to Meth’s catchy little song and lyrics. Animating to a song lends an advantage to a filmmaker because it provides a tight little structure on which to base a film around. I wondered if all of Meth’s shorts would be musical and I looked forward to finding out.

The next Meth Minute film, Sex Machine, was a James Brown spoof and, in part, also utilized a song as a key component. With this second film I understood was Meth was trying to do. The Meth Minute strives to be the internet equivalent of SNL’s cartoons by Robert Smigel. The strength and weaknesses of Meth’s films will be determined, not by his skill (he’s consistently a technically capable and confident filmmaker), but by how well he chooses his pop culture targets and how often his writing is able to carry it beyond an inspired title.

For example, the latest Meth Minute is called, Mike Tyson’s Brunch Out. Anyone of my generation (I’m a couple of years older than Meth) will immediately recognize the pun on the popular 1980s video game, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! I think Meth tried to create a deliberately disjointed short that gives one the feeling of picking up a little bit of conversation from each table at a busy restaurant. So, on one hand, the film makes a point about brunchers who are lost in their own worlds, while on the other hand, it’s simply illustrating the joke: here’s Mike Tyson placed out of context, eating brunch and spouting out Tysonisms on demand. For my taste, the dueling concepts compete with each other, and sap strength out of the whole. It’s interesting to see how many ideas a short film can or can’t hold and that’s part of the adventure of this whole enterprise. Over 39 films, they’ll win some and lose some.. and that seems about right.

The Meth Minute is a bold experiment and it’s well worth all of our support and encouragement. Besides, this is a NY production. Show some love!”

You may have seen and heard (sorry for the blown speakers) “The Happy Pumpkin”. It was included as part of the Fred O Ween episode of Channel Frederator.

The video was posted to YouTube two weeks ago. In that time, it has received nearly 200,000 views, was commented on 365 times, and was favorited 468 times. While it’s no “Internet People”, it’s no slouch, either.

Anyway, given the response the short has received, I thought it would be a great candidate for an experiment in self publishing.

What’s self publishing? Well, it’s basically the artist publishing material themselves instead of trying to get a publisher to do it for them. It’s like YouTube for paper.

I’m using a service called Lulu.

Basically, you set up an account, pick an item you want to create, upload the content, and set your price. When you sell something, they send you a check.

I’ve never self published before, so I’m not too sure how it will go. Want to help test out self publishing and help support independent animation in the process? You can buy a poster of the happy pumpkin or the scary skull here.

Be sure to post your experiences with self publishing in the comments section.
-Floyd Bishop

The Women in Animation event “So You Want To Make A Short” was a great time.

The event was held at Dreamworks, which has a beautiful campus.

This pond is actually part of the Dreamworks campus. There is incredible natural beauty everywhere you look, from the vines to the fish in the ponds.

My friends Phil and Deepa gave us a quick tour early in the day. There are fountains everywhere, and the whole environment has a very educational, almost college like quality.

After the tour, we had quite a bit of time to kill before the event, so we killed some time in Burbank. When we returned, Rachel Illowsky, Lisa Illowsky and I accidentally crashed a going away party for a storyboard artist.

Rachel, Po, and Lisa made fast friends. The wine was great and the artists we kind enough to let us keep drinking even after we realized we were in the wrong place.

The event itself was great, though it strayed a bit from the topic of short films. With many studios now using short films in place of pilots for series, the conversation quickly turned to series and what various studios are looking for.

Some of the tips from the panel included:

· You should know your characters.
· You should know their world.
· You should know a bit about the studio you are pitching to and what shows or shorts they have recently put out. Only pitch shorts or shows to places where they would fit under the umbrella of their usual content. For example, don’t pitch Rob Zombie type stuff (cool as it may be) to the Disney Channel.
· No one knows anything. One studio you pitch to may give you notes that won’t work for some other studio, or maybe won’t work for your pitch at all.
· Be prepared for some odd notes. “It’s too funny”, “We’re looking for the next Spongebob”, and “Would it work with a talking dog?” are just some of the notes you may hear while pitching.

They entire discussion was recorded and should be available as a podcast soon via the Women in Animation site. You can also become a member of the Women in Animation organization.

The evening was a good time, and I look forward to going to more of their events.

-Floyd Bishop

When I was seven years old “The Huckleberry Hound Show” made me fall in love with Hanna-Barbera cartoons forever. So when I accidentally became President of the studio in 1992 I was naturally biased towards honoring the classic characters that made me a fan in the first place.

It took us a few years to get it together on a lot of fronts (saving the studio from extinction was job one) but by 1995 we had key initiatives in place, including licensing Creative Director Russell Hicks, Animation Art head Tom Barreca, and business head Alan Keith. The whole studio was constantly disappointed with the lack of cool stuff from our licensees so we decided to take matters into our own hands. We began with building and stocking a retail store right in the studio with the merchandised we wished someone else would do (maybe if we sent sample to a licensee they’d see the wisdom in our way and make the product for mass consumption). And soon, the idea percolated up, in those pre-Ecommerce days, we should have a high end catalog to make the best stuff available to the general public.

Russell, Tom, Animation Art Creative Director Eric Homan, and AA Director David Barenholtz put their teams to work developing contemporary merch we thought was worthy of our classic characters, and conceiving a catalog to showcase the stuff properly. I got heavily involved (frankly, I probably would’ve taken the job as catalog chief if they’d asked in 1992; I had an unhealthy obsession with catalog selling). By 1996 everything was ready.

And then Ted Turner sold the company.

The dingbats from Warner Bros. (the division Hanna-Barbera was attached to in the merger) were of a classic corporate take-over mold. They completely flamed everything Hanna-Barbera. Whatever we did was considered sub-standard, everything they did was great (of course, who could forget Histeria?). Dump the crap, shred the catalog, please listen to what we want you to do. It was little consolation that Peter Starrett, the head dingbat at the Warner Bros. stores, was summarily corporately executed as his grand vision of retail went down in flames.
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Hanna-Barbera Creative Director: Russell Hicks
Animation Art Creative Director: Eric Homan
Written by Marty Pekar
Designed by Susan McIntyre

Animation Art Vice President: Tom Barecca
Animation Art Director: David Barenholtz

“Mike Tyson’s Brunch Out” is about a sports video game, so the sports people have taken as much notice as the video game people. Will Leitch, editor of Gawker’s sports division Deadspin wrote up the cartoon this morning. Will was also one of the editors of the discontinued blog Black Table which I drew comic strips for back in 2003 or so. You can find some of my old strips there if you dig around.

Thanks Will! Having my cartoon on Deadspin is the equivalent of being invited to sit with the jock table in the cafeteria.

-Dan

Over a month later “Internet People” is still inspiring people to make response videos. Here’s a new one that i find strangely fascinating. Thank you to Youtube user LiLD223 for this :

If you’ve forgotten the original have a look:

-Dan

I haven’t been much of a gamer for the past 18 years (there’s a reason I’m spoofing Nintendo games in 2007). But I do have some gamer friends. It’s a good thing too, because without them I wouldn’t have been notified that “Mike Tyson’s Brunch Out!!” has been blogged on the popular gamer sites Joystiq and Destructoid.

Thanks to pals Andrew Landry and Joshua Jularbal for the heads up. Both of these guys have contibuted their talents to the creation of “Meth Minute 39″ cartoons. In fact Joshua worked on much of the art and animation for “Brunch Out!!”

-Dan

Here’s an image for all the folks heading out to Halloween parties this weekend. Hey, ever wish you could have a Wolfman plush toy? How ’bout a Mummy or even a Gimp? Now you can at Cuddly Rigormortis. It comes to you from the brilliant minds of Kris and Ed, the creative duo behind Cha Pow Digital.
Joey Ahlbum

It’s been a crazy couple of days out here in Southern California. There have been (and still are) fires burning across much of Southern California. There are several people injured, a few that were killed, many acres burned, and many houses destroyed.

Here is an interactive fire map of the area.

My family and I were some of the 500,000 + people that were evacuated. We actually left before we were asked to. My wife and I had been talking last week about what we would do in the event of wildfires, and we stuck to our plan. We put the kids, the dog, some paperwork, and some hard drives in the van and took off.

We left our home around 11PM on Sunday. We drove to Mira Mesa high school and stopped there. My wife and kids slept while I stayed awake, listening to the radio news reports and watching the large flag in the parking lot to get an idea of wind speed and direction. The shelter filled up fast. My family stayed in the van so that others could have the cots and such in the shelter (the gym of the high school). I did go in to the school from time to time to find out what was going on from some of the workers there as well as grab some coffee from the Red Cross.

We left the shelter parking lot at around 4AM. We made a brief stop in Sorrento Valley so I could check online to see where the fires were and how widespread they had become. Most of the sites from the local news stations were down or had not been updated since midnight. I drove to the beach, figuring we would only have to worry about fire from one side then. We headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway and then on the 5 North until we got to an area where the air quality was better.

We saw some more smoke up ahead, farther up the 5, but it was far enough away that we felt like we were safe. We found a hotel just north of San Juan Capistrano. I was beat by the time we checked in and got everyone in an unpacked.

After nearly a week of watching the news and not knowing what was going on at our home, we finally got back today. The Rancho Bernardo area lost several homes, and there were two people found burned to death in Poway. There was no fire damage in our neighborhood, and only some signs of strong winds at my house.

We lucked out, but there are many people in the greater San Diego and Southern California area who didn’t do too well. If you would like to help, money seems to be the best thing you can donate at this time.

Here are some ways you can help.

Here is how YOU can be ready for an emergency

The next few days will be interesting. Just because the fires are out (or close to being out) doesn’t mean the crisis is over. There are many families with no place to go, and nothing but the clothes on their backs. The clean up and rebuilding efforts will continue for months. The investigation and search for the arsonists who started some of the fires that started when the blazes began will continue until the crimes are solved.

On an animation note, the Walt Disney Company pledged Wednesday to contribute $2 million to restore burned areas and help victims of the Southern California wildfires. It is going to be quite some time until the area returns to some semblance of normal, but with the nation’s help, we can get there faster.

If you were affected by the wildfires, be sure to post your experiences in the comments section.

-Floyd Bishop

Aaron Simpson of ColdHardFlash.com was in the other day and asked me about The Meth Minute 39 and how I make them. His resulting article is written very astutely. Thanks for featuring us and the new cartoon, Aaron! Stop by whenever your on the East Coast again.

Dan