MooBeard: The Cow Pirate

Hi, folks! Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. To make it up to you, I’m going to try to show you a clip from the MooBeard animatic. Let’s see if it works!

Here’s a look at MooBeard’s turnaround. I drew it, and Sam Bullock did the cleanups. Sam Bullock currently does cleanups on Danny Phantom, but back in 1998, he was my Animation Production II teacher at the Art Institute of Philadelphia!

Some folks wanted to see how the characters would look on the backgrounds, so here’s a sample! I took two of my keyframes, colored ‘em and put them on top of more of Craig Elliott’s brilliant bgs.

Here’s some super-groovy MooBeard art from Alicia Corke from Ottawa! I love the big meaty way she draws characters. Long-time blog-followers might recognize the other character as the popular but cut-for-time crewmate, Quill the Porcu-Pirate.

Here’s the first peek at the gorgeous backgrounds for MooBeard! They’re by Craig Elliott who, as you can see from his IMDB link normally does work for features. He has a very interesting and unconventional process, and he really makes it work. The image on the bottom is the background as he built it in the 3D program Maya rather than starting out with a sketch. He then painted over that image digitally using photoshop. It looks exactly the way I wanted it to… and I’m starting to wonder if Craig can read my mind. Can you, Craig? If so what am I thinking right now?

So, along with my director extrordinaire Jeff DeGrandis and cap’n sound editing human of awesome Michael Petak, I chose the final takes of all the lines in the show…
However, as a result, I now know that the cartoon is running long. The cartoon has to run 7 minutes long, and I need to cut a minute or two of stuff! Having rewritten this cartoon so many times, it’s really hard to know what can go! How do I know that I’m not cutting the best joke in the cartoon? I mean, have you ever watched the deleted scenes on a DVD and said to yourself “Man… why did they cut that?!”. That’s what I’m afraid of doing.

That said, what a fantastic problem to have! “Oh noez! Too much funny stuff!”

This week’s fan art comes from P. “Poinko” Gibson. For those who didn’t notice, you never do get to see MooBeard’s hands. I can only assume they’re in there. Those long sleeves are perfect for storing a seemingly endless arsenal of silly gadgets, though!

Also, Poinko has broken the previously non-existant record for “World’s Smallest MooBeard”.
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Chances are, if you leap forward in an attempt to grab a ninja (B), the ninja will cleverly disappear, leaving you to fall unceremoniously on your punim (C). Hunkering down for distance (A) will not help you at all, as it will only give the offending ninja even more of a chance to dodge your ill-planned attack.

This lesson in how not to leap toward a ninja was brought to you by Frederator�: Serving all your ninja-related diagram needs for nearly one day.

This week’s way cool fan art is from Stoney, whose real name I totally don’t know.

I can’t wait to see this stuff move. ^_^