Captain's Blog: April 2006

Zen Weekend

So, I did not do any Captain Capitalism work this weekend. None at all. I do realize that this is pretty off topic, for a supposed cartoon blog. But this past week was pretty stressful, work was busy and we had an illness in my family. This weekend I decided to take a bit of time off to relax.

On Saturday, Mandy and I went to Austin's Dragon Boat Festival. We watched some Chinese and Japanese dancers:

And we also watched teams from Samsung, Motorola, and Freescale race Dragon Boats on Townlake.

Those who have read the blog before, might remember the Praying Mantids that I kept last year. I admittedly have a weird fascination with these animals. Part of this comes from the Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu classes I take, and the other (bigger) part comes from being a giant dork. This year I ordered some Mantis egg cases off of ebay. They are sold as organic pest control. For many weeks I thought the pods were duds...then this morning I saw this:

Look closely. There are two in there, I only highlighted one, in the image below. There is another one on the leaf below the pod in the picture above.

I sat and watched the three mantids for several hours. Long enough to watch a spider kill and eat two, of the three, of them. It was kind of like watching a "Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom" episode in real life, complete with a "and that is nature's way" segment. Feeling sorry for the remaining mantis, (and being like a little kid wanting to keep something as a pet) I put the surviving mantis in a terrarium.

Soon afterwards, the Mantis shed its skin and grew about twice its size. It was amazing that the little creature fit in its skin before it came out. It was rather remarkable.

On Saturday night, around ten, Mandy and I went downtown to go to the opening of Austin's new Blanton Fine Art Museum. But when we got there, we found out we were not the only people who were going to take advantage of the free 24 hour opening of the museum. There were hundreds, if not thousands of people at the opening. The line went completely around the building, twice, and the average time waiting to get into the museum was 2 and a half hours.

All in all, it was a great relaxing weekend. I feel much better. I will get back to working on, and posting about Captain Capitalism next week.

Process

Sorry for not posting in a while. And I also want to apologize to everybody who has e-mailed me recently and not gotten responses. I am trying to get as much work done on this cartoon as possible. I am pretty frustrated about not having a new episode recently, and to be honest I have gotten rusty, so this cartoon is taking longer to start up than it should.

But I thought I would do a quick post on my process, this is not going to be anything revolutionary to most flash folks out there, but I thought I would share anyway...

Most of the Captain Capitalism cartoons are done using a combination of limited animation techniques and a "puppet" technique. It is sort of similar to how cut out animation is done, or even similar in some ways to doing 3d animation.

Almost everything in the CC cartoons are animated on paper first, and then inked. Here is a setup of one of the hare krishnas from the next cartoon. Why all the hare krishnas lately? Well they are very important to the next cartoon. That and I always have enjoyed drawing hare krishnas for some reason. I don't know if this is inspired from all the old Bloom Countys that I used to read or from running into them often in Houston while growing up.

Usually the drawings start out as blue pencil drawings, that I tend to go over and over and over and over...then I tighten it up with a red pencil...which I go over and over and over. It's a bad habit, that I catch a little grief over, but my pencil drawings come out looking like weird messy 3d art. I then put another sheet on the top pegs of my animation disc and seperate out the different "limited" animation parts in ink (using micron #2s and #8s, and a tradio fountain pen.)

I have gotten into the habit of not penciling out many facial expressions or mouth shapes. I generally make them up as I am inking...which means I end up tossing a bunch of them out, but I kind of like the facial expressions that are made up on the fly.

I try to save paper by covering as much of the 16 field paper with as many parts as I can.

I then vectorize the ink image and bring it into Flash. Voila:

(BTW...the images I have been posting lately don't seem to "blow-up" when you click on them. I am not doing anything different, but if anybody has an idea why this might be happening, please let me know.)

After, all the parts are in Flash, I color them all. I have got a thing for colored lines...because it is so much easier to do in Flash than it was in older animation programs. However, this takes a bit of time, and if I just could let it go, the cartoons would probably come out much faster.

After everything is colored, I break the "puppet" into levels and convert the various parts to symbols, and frames within symbols and make sure everything is lined up. If the character is going to have any close-ups I also go in and tweak the lines a bit, smoothing everything out.

Then the little guy is all ready to animate:

I tried out a wacom cintiq once, and I think I could work on these cartoons in a "paperless" pipeline, if I had one. But Captain Capitalism is going to have to live up to his name a bit more for me to get one for home.

Cars

Jason Williams made some really nice cars for the next cartoon:

These are loosely based on cars that Tom Oreb designed. Found the designs on Amid Amidi's fantastic Cartoon Modern Blog.

Hook swords & Editorial Cartoon books

I spent a lot of this weekend doing expressions and mouth shapes for the next cartoon. I don't have anything scanned yet, but I will put some in soon. I am experimenting with expressions that are pushed a little more than normal, we will see how it works.

Sam Deats finished a background for the opening shot of the cartoon:

Pretty cool, huh?

On Saturday, I had a Kung-fu seminar for a few hours on the hook-sword.

Looks like something out of Star Trek doesn't it? The form we learned was pretty difficult. I think I might be able to remember this one better than some of the others.

I saw the rest of that South Park episode, nothing is too similar to what I am doing.

It is amazing what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have created. There is a strange expectation that the public has from South Park, and they can get away with more just from the way they have slowly blurred, pushed and moved the line over time.

South Park can get away with more than any other show on television. But I also think that South Park maintains a great logical middle ground. I honestly think it teaches extremely valuable lessons. South Park is like the best kind of editorial cartoon, it presents and lampoons both sides of an issue, and some how makes you examine what you believe...while you are laughing. Except that unlike an editorial cartoon, the South Park world and its characters are extremely well developed, which is more than most live action sitcoms can say.

Speaking of editorial cartoons, this weekend I picked up a couple of new Editorial cartoon books; Daryl Cagle's "The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2006 Edition" and Charles Brook's "The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year: 2006 Edition"

This is the first time I have bought one of Cagle's books. I go to his website daily, and really enjoy his blog (during the Danish Mohammed cartoons, his blog was fantastic.) The book is nice, some of the cartoons are unfortunately printed pretty small, but it seems to have a really good mix of cartoons. I have been collecting the Brook's book for a long time. I have them set-up almost encyclopedia like in my office going back to 1975.

More about Captain Capitalism in the next post...

These things take too long to make

Above is an image from the cartoon I am working on now. I heard that Wednesday's South Park was about the same subject matter that my cartoon is about, The Danish Mohammed cartoons controversy.

Being a former editorial cartoonist (and not a terribly good one), I have a lot of pretty strong feelings about the subject. I have been wanting vent some of these feelings, but it has taken me a while to come up with a way to do it. I don't want to give anything away, but I am pretty pleased with the script.

I knew that Southpark was going to tackle the subject. They turn those cartoons around fast. I have not seen the full episode yet, but I am hoping our concepts don't cross. I don't want to hear "he just stole his idea from Southpark."

Their concept is probably a lot more genius than mine anyway. It is amazing what they get away with. These guys definately deserve the recent Peabody award.

The only clip I have seen involves them getting a jab or two in only "The Family Guy," it was up at cartoonbrew today, but I don't know how long it will be up.

Captain Capitalism's "Manley" voice

After a bit of a search, I have found a new voice for Captain Capitalism.

Meet George Manley. With a name like Manley, I think he was born to do the voice of a character like Captain Capitalism. It has been a lot of fun talking with George, and sending voice files back and forth trying to "find" a new voice direction for Captain Capitalism.

George is based out of Houston and does a lot of work on anime cartoons (including a lot of writing). He is a really talented guy, and I look forward to working with him more.

Check out his website: www.georgemanley.com

Flash Gordon influence

Recently re-found this image from a Flash Gordon DVD...you can probably see that I drew some influence for Captain Capitalism from it. Captain Capitalism was around for a while before I saw this, but you definately see some influence in the colors, hair-d0, and even in the "poster" images I have done in the past.

Orginally, Captain Capitalism was more of a "space-hero" like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. He combatted inter-galactic communism, a threat from outer-space. This still is an element in some of the scripts I have been writing recently, but as you can tell from the cartoons I have done recently...I have moved away from this a bit.

Captain Capitalism: The Arcade

A big part of Powerhouse Animation's business in the early days was making Flash based Arcade machines. The games were in an arcade machine, and were generally side scrollers with end bosses, and lost of animated "cinematics." We made on for Kevin Smith as a wrap party gift for, then couple, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. We have made about six of these "arcade kiosks." It was based on an idea that former Powerhouse programmer, Jason Yandell and I had. We were driving around Austin and found an old Galaga box that had been gutted and was for sale We decided to fit it with a PC and make some Flash applications and games to play on it. We programmed a Flash based MAME menu, and did some minor C++ operating system stuff to make it work.

Long story short, we have had the prototype at the Powerhouse offices, and it has about 3,000 classic arcade games on it, and it is a great way for guys at the office to take a break.

Finally, 5 years later, I have one in my living room...and I am pretty excited. The wife and I have been playing a lot of Klax lately.

Special thanks go to Becky Bollom and the fine folks at Photo Magic for working with me on printing the side art.

And yes, the Captain Capitalism arcade machine is between two Italian Communist Party posters, I "borrowed" them from the side of a building in Rome when Mandy and I were there about two years ago. Figured in a communist world they would be part mine anyway. Friggin commies.

The above is a photo of the menu screen that comes on when you fire the machine up. I have about 150 games in the menu from Asteroids to Zaxxon, Dig Dug to Q-bert...but the games that get played the most are Tetris, Klax, Marvel Superheroes, and Street Fighter Alpha.

I will eventually put some Captain Capitalism games in there, but for now I am concentrating on the next cartoon.

The sharp-eyed among you might notice that I ganked the pose on the girl on the lower right from a Shane Glines drawing of Poison Ivy. Sorry about that, but since the piece is only in my living room, I thought it might be ok.

Well, I'm going to try to make it to the bananas in Ms. Pac-man...

First image from next CC cartoon

Well, here is the first completed set-up from the next Captain Capitalism cartoon: Hare-Rama Rampage. I don't want to talk too much about the cartoon and give it away but it has been so long, I want to put something up.

I have finally found a new voice for Captain Capitalism. But I will talk about that more shortly.

Powerhouse Animation turns 5

Powerhouse Animation is now 5 years old.

Frank, Bruce, and I founded the company on April 1, 2005. Last Friday, we had a little party at Buca di Beppo's "pope table."

Last year, the "pope table" did not have a bust because it was the night that John Paul became ill. Right before we ate, they removed the bust. This year, however, they had a new bust to bless the fete.

Jason Williams, Powerhouse's beloved son, and amazing Captain Capitalism contributor:

Jennifer Borrell Anderson, who has helped out a lot on CC, and her husband Ryan enjoy some of the mounds of Italian food:

Frank and his wife Leslie, and Mandy and I:

Bruce and his wife Jess:

After dinner, we went 25 yards next door to Dave & Busters. Mandy and I had to take off a little early, so we can go to Houston to visit the new baby, but we got a few pictures before we headed out. Including this one of me, acting like Captain Capitalism: