Happy New Year! :D

This is one of the first drawings I did on my crappy little tablet PC. Hope you like it! :)

More old drawings! :)

I was no Ava (she's amazing!) but here's a drawing I did for my dad's 35th birthday when I was like four:



And here's another drawing, I think from early high school probably:

Here's another old drawing that hangs around at my parents' house:


I did this using the GIMP years ago (at least five or six years ago I think). At the time I was getting really excited about what I could do with drawing directly into the computer using the mouse! Unfortunately a lot of these got lost. I still have the hard drives, however, so perhaps I can recover them someday :)

So I'm home in Tallahassee for a little while for Christmas. I borrowed my dad's digital camera and took some bad pictures of two of my drawings which hang in the hallway here:


I don't remember when exactly I did this one, but it was years ago... Also, the lines are blue in real life, but the camera blackified them somehow. It's a bit bigger than 8.5x11" which is why I couldn't scan it.



This one's really old! I think I did this in first grade (or possibly right before). It's poster-sized.


Hope you like them! :)

After hanging out with my pal Karl today (he gave me a Moleskine!!), I was inpsired to try animating on paper. I only did eleven frames, but man, it was really, really fun to draw on actual paper, and have a tiny stack of it with real drawings on each sheet!! I can really see why people love doing it like this so much...

Here are two frames:





Test Animation on Paper

Here's a piece I did for the Mint Pin-up Show! I scanned it before I cut it into four cards.

The ASIFA-Atlanta holiday party was a blast!! :D

I got to meet Lee Crowe who animated in LA for 20 years- she worked on "Cool World" and a bunch of other films, holy smoke! She is super nice too. She likes my drawings!! That made me really, really happy.

Ward showed some really amazing old animation from UPA and Oskar Fischinger. Then I got to show my friend Bryan's animation "Get Got" (viewable online here) which I loooooooooove!!!! He also built the website for Animation Attack, a fest we're planning to have in July. Call for entries coming soon hopefully!

Then Joe Peery's band the Floating Coats played! Everybody seemed to love it :)

A bunch of my friends were there- people I adore so much! Charles Judson from CinemATL was there of course, and my good friend Robert, through whom I met Bryan in the first place (and lots of other people). Another very good buddy of mine, Karl, was also there (he is in charge of the Animation Workshop that meets monthly!!). Felix drew me and various other people. Joe K from Primal handled signing up new members. I also had the pleasure of seeing my pals Sean Corey Adams and Joanna Davidovich, although I didn't get to hang with them as much as I wanted!

I'm sure I'm forgetting several people I love a lot (Jeffrey and Ashtree!!) but it was really fun :)

Yay for ASIFA!

At Lee's recommendation, I'm probably going to join ASIFA-Hollywood. I never thought about it since I don't live there of course, but apparently they send you movies sometimes.

Ah yes! I forgot to mention in my last post, tomorrow night (well, technically tonight since it's now 1:04 AM haha) is the ASIFA-Atlanta holiday party!! Here's what Vella sent out about it, and I'm putting together a DVD of some of the highlights from International Animation Day that'll be shown:

Please come out and join us for our ASIFA Holiday party. Everyone is welcome and it’s free to get in!!

All current members that re-new their memberships will receive two free drink tickets!

If you want to become a member and sign up at the party, you’ll receive one free drink ticket!

See you at the 5 Spot at 7pm on Monday, December 18^th!

There will be an animation screening curated by Ward Jenkins!

Don’t forget that Floating Coats are performing at 9pm! They are AWESOME!

Charles Judston at CinemATL generously asked me to send him what I'll be doing (hopefully!) in 2007. Read it! :)

Here's the drawing I did for it:

"Lips"

Apologies for not posting more! More drawings will be up here some day, I promise :)

For the next month or so hopefully I'll be working a lot on a new short.

One reason for no posts lately was my helping Joe Peery put together International Animation Day for ASIFA-Atlanta. It was a blast!

Here's what I wrote about it:

International Animation Day, October 30th, Atlanta

For me, it started with an email asking for volunteers to help ASIFA-Atlanta with International Animation Day. This was something I very much wanted to do, for so many reasons: I love ASIFA, I was hoping to get to hang out with Joe, I would get to see animation from around the world... I'd remembered Joe speaking at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival about how amazing international animation is and how we should really
show some in Atlanta.

Joe was smart and told me what to do: I got to send emails to a bunch of different countries. This itself was interesting; for instance, we got a reply from Iran. Sadley, they couldn't send us anything, as it would take too long to get through the filters. You hear about this kind of thing on the news but this was so real- here is a fellow animation fan across the world, and he can't send us a DVD. It left a bit of an imperssion on me.

What was also noticeable about this was every country was so friendly and helpful! They were so kind to us and sent us a number of DVDs. At first we were worried about lack of material, but as more and more DVDs arrived, soon we had plenty! We got DVDs from Hungary, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Israel, and France

The next step was to go through it all and pick out the cream of the crop. This was a lot of fun too, actually! I got to visit Joe, and we ate pizza and watched animation together, which was a lot of fun. Some DVDs (Israel and Japan, and the one from France that would arrive later) blew us away. At one point Joe remarked after a couple of particular marvelous films, "Ah, this is why we do this."

The next step was for me to figure out exactly which films to put to DVD to show. It was difficult to narrow down just the best ones, and I still think I could have decided better, but I made the program and spent the weekend making the DVDs- it was a learning experience. Here's the program:

1. beton 6 min (israel)
2. laughing moon 6 min (japan)
3. found country 2 min (portugal)
4. leo 5 min (israel)
5. float 4 min (israel)
6. pieces 2 min (japan)
7. hogyan repuljunk 2 min (hungary)
8. ski jumping pairs 6 min (japan)
9. wind's embrace 3 min (portugal)

intermission

1. never say devil 8 min (israel)
2. circles 8 min (israel)
3. syncopation 6 min (israel)
4. home alone 4 min (japan)
5. ktse hoot 3 min (israel)
6. well 3 min (hungary)
7. elevonal 6 min (hungary)

So Monday morning arrives, and I put the second DVD in and happened to have a look at "Circles". "Oh no," I think as I watch it, "it's way too compressed!" The bitrate was too low, and compressing it twice didn't help either.

No problem, though: I simply re-encoded all the films to my laptop and didn't recompress them to make a DVD. It took some time, but I couldn't stand the quality being low. My thinking was we could play directly from the computer, or even from the original DVDs. We actually ended up playing from the laptop, but I'll get to that soon!

So I leave work early (feels good!) and head to Relapse Theatre to meet up with Joe and Bob Wood, who runs Relapse and was very generous to let us use the space. Karl Sigler (of http://atl-animators.org/ which had its first meeting just the other night) arrives as well, heroically bringing his projector and white sheet as a backup (thanks so much, Karl!).

We all started to set up, and were testing out the sheets we had, when Ward arrived, to the rescue!! Ward kindly went to a lot of trouble to get us a goregous screen that his brother-in-law uses in his performances with his group Mars Ill (exellent hip hop, I recommend it). The projection looked fantastic.

People began to actually arrive, and I saw many familiar faces- the dedicated Westwood students who always show up to drawing on Thursday nights at Westwood College, a bunch of people I'd seen at previous events, such as Charles Judson. I run into him at every animation or film event I go to, it seems like, and it's always a pleasure. He writes for CinemATL. Several of my friends were kind enough to come by (Alex, Martin, Robert, Tak, Tim, and Margaret for instance). I can't name everyone I remember seeing, but it was a good turnout! I talked to Adam, who's always at ASIFA stuff, and he and his friend actually skipped class to come!

Everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly, but when we tried to get sound out of the laptop, we had a problem! After tinkering with it for a while, a sound engineer friend of Joe happens to arrive, and he saves the day. This man is my hero, seriously. I know how to pronounce his name ("see-la" I think) but have no idea how to spell it. Anyway, I gave him a big hug!

Because of the sound problem, we got started a little late, but once things got going, it seemed like the crowd really enjoyed it. Even though we'd seen all the films before (and some of them several times... I've watched "Pieces" and "Laughing Moon" lots of times), Joe and I both felt that seeing them on this great screen with Relapse's big speakers was just marvelous.

The audience applauded after every short, which I thought was really nice! One film that people seemed to particularly enjoy was "Ski-Jumping Pairs". It got the loudest laughs I think! Joe said we had to put that one in, and he was completely right- it is really funny.

We had an intermission, during which people mingled and snacked on the free snacks ASIFA provided (come to drawing class and you not only get to practice drawing but you're contributing money toward events like this!) and drank the drinks Relapse was selling (we like Relapse, they were very good to us).

We watched the second half of the program, took another short break, and we ended the night we several shorts from the French DVD. These were simply incredible, and I was glad that people stuck around.

IAD was a blast, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. A HUGE thanks to Karl for the projector and set up help, Ward for the beautifully gorgeous screen and backup projector, Bob for being so welcoming with Relapse, Joe's absolutely heroic sound engineer friend, and our friendly and generous ASIFA contacts in other countries for sending us the DVDs, without which there wouldn't have been a program here at all. And Joe for letting me help with this, and Vella too!

Two character designs for "man playing a guitar". Did these at like 1 or 2AM while my great friend Sharkey slept. Sent them to Cameron and got so much kind encouragement!!

Apologies for the poor scans... and I know I have a long way to go in terms of construction etc. But I'm making slow progress :)

"Suited Man with Cigar"

My dear friend Cameron really liked this one, so much so that I'm actually posting it (thanks Cameron!).

I always love Kevin's posts! Today's was about Tex Avery's "Little 'Tinker", and I had actually watched this one before- I love it too!!

When I'd watched it I found one part I particularly liked and went through it frame by frame. I captured some and put them below... Something about how the feet movement cracks me up so much!

Ideally I would want to post at least one drawing per day on here :) I really appreciate the comments people have left :)

Here's one from fluidtoons.com (to make a comeback this weekend hopefully!):

"Not So Smart"

Here's my drawing for Katie Rice's birthday!! :) Her drawings are incredible. I wanted to do something better, but after partying at Freedumb Fest 2 into this morning, I'm worn out!

But hope you had an awesome birthday, Katie :)

And thanks John for getting everyone to draw like this, it's been really fun seeing what people have come up with and I enjoyed doing this one :)

So the opening night of Atlanta Underground Film Festival was incredible! I had such a blast :)

It started off a little rocky: projector wasn't set up, we didn't have a long enough audio cable to position the projector where it needed to be for the image to fit on the screen, so poor Eric had to run home and get his long cable, so we started about 30 minutes late, haha. This stuff happens all the time! People were pretty patient. I made announcements about how soon it would start.

After the films was the animators demos/lectures portion. I was in charge of this, and it seemed to have gone great!! A lot of people left but it was actually nice to have a smaller, more intimate crowd for that. Joe Peery talked about how awesome international animation is and then it was my turn, followed by all the indie animators (yay!), followed by Brian of Harvey Birdman and then Mack and Neal of Frisky Dingo.

Basically my demo was "Flash in Five Minutes!" and I passed out a one page guide that I went by. I pulled up this example to demonstrate sound, and then I showed the folks how to do that. I was super nervous but people seemed to enjoy it, whch is wonderful- I got a couple laughs and Joe later told me it was a good intro to Flash (not necessarily to animation itself).

But yeah it was an amazing experience. I really appreciated Isaac from work showing up (he doesn't know Atlanta at all, he works on the west coast!), what a guy! Another friend from work, John, tried to show up but couldn't find the place, which I totally understand and I appreciated his attempt so much.

Geez, I was just blown away by some of the demos. John Cason showed some *beautiful* rotoscope in Mirage (he showed different layers of this one shot, which included rain and shadows and characters... check his stuff at http://www.lilliebross.com/) and Brian of course showed unbelieveable Harvey Birdman animation (remember Wally the alligator??). And Mack was able to show a whole episode of Frisky Dingo- he and Neal are always hilarious. I could talk about each person in depth, actually- I made a new friend, Tak, who did some amazing stop motion... and Robert answered questions about Roboctopus, always delightful, and Marshall showed us how he does his cutout animation (wow).

Anyway, I hope to do something like it again sometime :)

Oooo, I like Patrick Smith!

Moving Along on AtomFilms

AWN Interview

And Kevin Langley, one of perhaps two people who read this blog, has an incredible blog himself which I recommend you look at :) He suggested I post about how the Atlanta Underground Film Festival animation night went, so I suppose I will do that soon! Thanks Kevin :)

I drew this goofy guy in Humza's sketchbook on the 2nd of June, and last Friday I copied him onto a piece of loose paper to scan him here :)

Hmm, not sure when I drew this chicken, but it was in a little sketchbook.

Oh boy! :)

I'm speaking at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival (http://www.auff.org and http://myspace.com/auff) and got several other animators to speak too.

*And* Joe Peery, President of ASIFA-Atlanta, is speaking a little also!

Short notice I know, and I also know nobody really reads this, but come if you can :)

Thanks! :)

Eeeee!!!

I couldn't believe it, I got to meet John K. Wow.

He drew this super fast and gave me some good advice about my own drawings ("Learn to draw with construction"). I was rather nervous (perhaps understandable- he's a hero!!) but I just *loved* listening to him talk all about old cartoons and whatnot (did you know that Clampett was so intuitive he couldn't really articulate how he did what he did?).

I took lots of notes during both events (the meet and greet at the Cartoon History Museum and the screening at the Castro) and plan to post them here assuming I can still decipher them, hahaha.

So much to say about the event. I made three friends immediately and they were all really nice and cool. One of them, Leigh, draws beautifully and might draw for John someday, who knows!

I also got up the courage to leave John a copy of Chickenheads! I see about a zillion things about it I want to make better (it's really flat, it's got twins, there's almost no full body motion), but it's before I started really looking at the Preston Blair book and it was the best I could do at the time.

Anyway it was incredible to meet him: thanks for all the laughs and inspiration, John :)