6 Monsters

It doesn’t come up often, but every once in a while, someone will ask me what my favorite cartoon or bit of animation is. It happened this weekend at a dinner with the in laws. Being a CG guy, people usually expect me to say Toy Story, or Tron, or even Ice Age (the first CG feature I worked on).

It’s not any of those. My favorite cartoon ever is from 1950, and has nothing to do with computers at all. It’s the Tex Avery short film Ventriloquist Cat.

If you’ve not seen it, the short is about a cat who finds a device which will throw his voice. He then uses the device to torture a dog through the rest of the film.

While most of the short is one standard cartoon gag after another (maybe not at the time), the ending is brilliant. The dog (who the cat has been torturing through [Read more…]

Lulu – the devil – is Tina Louise in Gilligan’s Island.

Manipulative, in a sweet way. Selfish, in a sweet way. Sweet, in a sweet way. Not only does she have it all – she works it well. We tolerate her for the same reason we tolerated Ginger – Ginger loved Gilligan as a little girl loves a wounded sparrow. And she watched out for him the way a big sister would. Which doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do everything she could do to get Gilligan’s water ration when she was thirsty. But let anyone else come after Gilligan’s water ration, and she would become an impenetrable force field between the attacker and the water.

Lulu has the same relationship with Roy. Big as he is, Roy is rather defenseless and gullible. She talks to Cathy as though Cathy is the naïve younger girl who will learn from her world-weary pal Lulu, but Cathy is wise [Read more…]

It’s raining today, and we just got back from an extended lunch at the Pizza Hut Bistro. We hadn’t planned on the extended lunch, but apparently the abacus at the Pizza Hut broke down as they were trying to split our check.

Anyway, we’ve got quite a few ideas for our section of the Six Monsters short. We’re thinking of having a bit with Gailard and Buck at the school water fountain. Buck walks up as Gailard is drinking at the water fountain.

Fur is already tough enough for a minute of CG, and water presents it’s own set of problems, but I think the gags we have in mind will be worth all the extra effort. We’ll be boarding this whole thing out in greater detail next week. Until then, try and stay dry.

-Floyd

Cathy – the pumpkin – is lovely, helpful, smart, generous, and outgoing. If you were in school still, and she were a classmate, she’d be the one the teachers would tell you “plays with everyone.”

But she is a pumpkin. I don’t have to tell you what body image is to a pre-teen girl. You can deal with kinky hair. Heck, you can even go all “wild-girl hair” these days. But no girl wants to look like a pumpkin. Of all the monsters, she might be the only one who seems to realize she looks different from everyone else. But you’ll never get her to crack, and on the surface she remains unfazed by the negative comments we know must be coming her way.

She knows she’s an oddball. She wishes she weren’t. But she refuses to let her difference bother her. In fact, the biggest problem she faces comes [Read more…]

Buck – the cat – is worried he did the wrong thing.

Worried someone will find out.

Worried he’ll get in trouble for it.

Worried that if he doesn’t get it trouble, someone else will get it trouble by mistake and the wrong person will be blamed, and they’ll hate him for getting them in trouble.

Worried that any decision he makes might be the wrong one, because, just imagine what great stuff could have happened if he had made the other choice.

Worried that he spends too much time worrying.

And so, because he worries, he is always checking to see if everything is all right. He is a manic talker. The words just flood out of him. He also shares with real cats that peculiar behavioral trait that causes them to bolt, inexplicably, from this room to that room, RIGHT NOW.

WHAT HE WANTS: He wants to know [Read more…]

One of the challenges of Buck is his distinct markings on his belly. He’s got the number “13″ right there in his fur. Why is it there? Is it a birth mark? Is it paint? Who knows?

The way CG fur works is to apply map after map to the fur settings to achieve things like growth, length, color, transparency, frizz, etc.

In this test, we’ve applied a texture map to both the base and tip of the fur that has the number “13″ in white text on it. We then threw in a quick rig to see how the fur deforms when the underlying object bends. Here’s the result:

Fuzzy 13 test

The next few tests will be to see if we can make the fur look wet. Why? What do we have in mind for poor Buck? You’ll have to keep watching this space to find out!

-Floyd

Roy –the big guy– is a man of few words.

He doesn’t intentionally scare you – in fact, he’s always a little surprised to find out he has caused alarm, The ground shakes a little when he moves and he is often perplexed by the source of the noise he makes. (Boom! Boom! Boom! The walls echo as he crosses the room. He stops, listens. A long beat. “You hear that?” he asks.) He apologizes quickly, with a word or two, when he knocks something over. (“Oops. My fault. Sorry.”) It’s just a factor of his size, nothing more.

He is an eager but awkward dancer, loves to draw despite his complete lack of artistic ability, and is often caught singing tunelessly to himself or rehearsing in monotone dramatic parts no one will ever cast him to play.

Like Frankenstein’s original monster, he is a music lover. Beautiful music will [Read more…]

Computers can make metal boxes very well. Everything else is a bit tougher.

Rather than make Buck the Cat into a metal box (which may be a bit too much interpretation of the character on our part), we decided to go all out and make him have a realistic “cat like” surface.

CG fur is tricky, because aside from the whole look of the thing, you have to think about how the fur will behave once it moves around. Since Buck is a very toony cat, we plan on having a lot of squash and stretch. Chris Boylan, our rigger extrordinaire, is going to be putting in a ton of controls to allow us to squish this guy up into as many cool poses as possible. I wanted to make sure the fur would hold up and not show any bald spots or other weirdness as the underlying surface deformed.

This [Read more…]

I so behind that I created this Six Monsters blog and then completely forgot to post.

Alan Goodman and I are trying something we think could be fun: a ’sketch comedy’ for cartoons. Six directors creating one short!

Six rep characters (that’s them above, designed by Alex Kirwan; we’ll introduce you to each of them individually over the next few posts) will make up the short in a series of one minute gags. “So?” you ask. Each gag is going to written, drawn, and animated in the unique style of it’s artist/director/writer’s style. The models above are only guides; there’s no need for each creative team to stay “on model”, just on character.

An unusal approach for a cartoon series I think.

You’ve already met Floyd Bishop, one of our directors, who’s doing the CG minute. We’ll introduce to everyone else this week.

We’re going to enjoy this ride. Hope you do too.

–Fred

Hello everyone. We’re working on part of the Six Monsters project for Random Cartoons. We’ll be doing a minute of full on CG for the short.

“Where did you say your studio was?”

That’s probably the question I get asked the most when I meet other people in the animation industry. We’re located in rural Pennsylvania, in the Poconos. Think of every teen summer camp movie you have ever seen combined with a little bit of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “The Andy Griffith Show”. That’s what it’s like here in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. I grew up here, so when it came time to start my own shop (after my time in the meat grinder of large studio CG feature animation), I checked to see if high speed internet found it’s way to the Poconos. It did, so I set up shop in the mountains.

While we are “rural”, our clients are not. The bulk [Read more…]