Random things...

Well, I have finished writing the next two cartoons. I am still going to doing a few more edits to touch up the dialogue, and refine them a bit before I send them to the voice folks.

I watched Talledega Nights the other day. And they mention Manimal in the movie. Manimal is also mentioned in my next toon, so I am a little heartened that the film execs felt confident enough in the reference to use it in the film. I am still befuddled by how many people did not recognize the Greatest American Hero in the last cartoon.

I turned 31 the other day. Had a good birthday, complete with a Captain America cake. I'll post a picture here when I get it. My wife got me a great boxing set complete with speedbag for my birthday and Christmas, and I have been playing a lot with that lately. I kind of slacked off working out and missed a lot of kung-fu while I was finishing the cartoon and busy with the holidays, I am looking forward to getting back on track in the new year.

Looking forward to the UFC event this weekend...should be a good card.

If you missed Meet the Press last weekend, check it out. There was an interesting conversation with Rick Warren, the author of "A Purpose Driven Life," about Christianity, Capitalism, and Communism.

See ya in the New Year!

Brad

Animovie maker

If you are an animator, or would like to be, check out the Animovie maker.

http://www.jazwares.com/animovie/

Basically it is all of my childhood dreams come true on two fronts. First of all, it is a battery powered pencil test machine for less than $60. Second, it has Marvel Superheroes all over it.

I gave one to my nephew for Christmas, and bought one for myself too. I took the one I bought myself apart, and I am trying to figure out a way to connect the pieces directly to my animation disc.

It is a webcam that connect directly to your TV through RCA jacks, similar to those Atari 2600 and Pacman toys they sell now. But you can capture sequential images, and play them back at 6 frames per second. The picture is pretty decent, and it is a fast way to capture your keys as you are drawing, without having to scan or go to your computer and test the animation.

I can't imagine how much time and money this would have saved me, over time ,if I had one of these when I was younger. In highschool I had to shoot things on Super-8, and then send the film in to get developed at $48 bucks a pop, not to mention that by the time the film came back I had lost all interest in whatever it was I was working on. I have had tons of slow, and expensive scanners on CGA computers, and VGA computers. It would take forever to scan and publish movies to watch. These days, I still use a scanner that takes about 1 minute per drawing at home...

The drawback is the 6 frames per second. Most of the Captain Capitalism cartoons are animated at 24 fps. But this is a good way to check keys, or watch a slow play to check arcs and things like that...

While on the phone at work I do little "post-it-note" animations...in the next few weeks I will capture some of these with the animovie maker and show you how it works.

Tracking Nightmare

Well, Christmas has come and gone. As I approach the new year, I am going to stop checking the stats on the Nightmare Cartoon, and concentrate on finishing the next two cartoons. My goal is to have the next one done by mid February.

I came pretty close to the goal of 100,000 views. Here is how it broke down, as of the last time I checked on Dec 27th:

Newgrounds: 75,000 views
Captain Capitalism.com: 6,185 views
Flash Portal: 9,736 views
Vidshadow: 2,186 views
Youtube: 395 views

Total views I can track: 93,502

I also found the cartoon on several sites that somehow got the swf, and put it up on a site, and I cannot track those hits...so I think I might have actually come really close to 100,000.

Newgrounds helped sponsor the toon, and I sold some minor merchandise.

Next time around I am going to experiment with doing some internet ad buying, just to see how that affects things.

One interesting experience I had was trying to post the message boards. It was recieved fairly well in a couple of places, but the at the majority of messageboards I just got flamed for trying to "advertise" my stuff. I think that is kind of funny, considering the cartoon is up for free for the world to see...and I dont make any money off of views. In fact, if anything I lose money due to bandwidth overages. I was a little more prepared this time, but still got hit a little bit by going over my allowed bandwidth. Meh.

How the cartoon is doing

So the cartoon has been out for a few days, and seems to be getting around fairly well...despite it not being posted very many places.

So far, as of 10:45pm, here is the view count:

The Youtube version, which is really only referenced on this blog and the myspace page has been viewed 145 times.

The Newgrounds version has been viewed 45,537 times.

The version on Captain Capitalism has been viewed either 4,623 or 2,720 times. Something strange is going on with the counter. If you did not notice, there is a number at the bottom-left of the screen before the credits start. If you look at it closely, it flashes two numbers. I don't know what is happening there. However, since the session count on the site is 6,000ish, and I am an opimist, I am going to go with the higher number.

Since Wednesday, (when it "public") the cartoon has been viewed about 50,305 times. Which I am pretty pleased with.

I hope that by Christmas the cartoon gets about 100,000 views. That would make me happy.

As I have said, Captain Capitalism is a kind of experiment for me. This one has taught me a lot. I'll post more about that later.

Recommended viewing and reading

While working on Captain Capitalism, I am easily distracted by television or movies. But I generally have to have some sort of outside stimuli going on when I am working on the more mundane processes of making something like these cartoons. So, alot of the time I will listen to audiobooks while working on the toons. To keep me in the Captain Capitalism mood, I listened to both 1776 and John Adams by David McCullogh. By the way for all of you MLA fanatics, I did not underline the book titles, because this blogger window apparently does not have an underline option.

Anyway, I highly recommend both of these books. They are both very engaging and well written.

We, (because Mandy, [my wife] and I usually read together), have been reading a bunch of history books lately. One of these books is Russia: A Concise History by Ronald Hingley. Although the book is a bit outdated, it is completely fascinating and a good read for anybody who wants to learn more about Russian History. If you are one of the people on Newgrounds who was upset because Marx had a German accent in my cartoon...please buy and read this book. Either that or use Wikipedia.

Another book that is great, and gets flipped through almost everytime I work on Captain Capitalism is Red Scared! by Michael Barson and Steven Heller. The book is a collection of posters from films and other media during the McCarthy era.

As I said in one of the responses to a review on Newgrounds, I am more interested in the propaganda war than the actual "communism vs. capitalism "debate. In fact, I think it is almost surreal that that debate gets brought up based on these cartoons. I don't know how anyone could take these seriously. The inspiration behind the cartoon is more like a "What if?" Marvel comic, the "What if" being: "What if there was a superhero cartoon that was used to espoused Cold War era propaganda?"

As I have said, I am a big fan of the cartoons that were used in propaganda. Especially those like John Sutherland's King Joe and Make Mine Freedom. Both of these cartoons were created for Harding College to "create a deeper understanding of has made America the finest place in the world to live." Being a comic book fan, I thought it would be fun to explore this in terms of a superhero.

On a non-Captain Capitalism subject. If you did not see "Meet the Press" this weekend. Seek it out. It is available for free as a "pod cast" on I-tunes. Now I may be the only person in the world who is fanatical about "Meet the Press," (it is the only show that I set on our Tivo), but this episode was even better than most and, I would even say, important to watch.

Nightmare of a Red Christmas

So the cartoon is out and about...if you ended up on the blog you probably saw the new link through the website.

You can also check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzqSzbrtTao
And feel free to link to it, in any manner, but I put the youtube version up, in case folks wanted to do one of those fancy links, where you see the youtube window in a blog or whatever.

I wanted to thank Tom Fulp, and the fine folks at Newgrounds for helping out by sponsoring the cartoon. Hopefully it will do well enough, and that they will continue to sponsor the shorts.

Speaking of, if anybody else wants to sponsor Captain Capitalism let me know. His name ain't a joke, we'll throw your logo up on the cartoon. Heck, he'll use your product in the next cartoon if you would like.

And speaking of Newgrounds, check out and vote for the Star-spangled Sentinnel of the American way here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/353983

Read the reviews if you get a chance. While I appreciate them all, they are quite funny at times.

Also, Captain Capitalism has joined the Paris Hilton set and gotten a myspace page:
http://myspace.com/captaincapitalism

Last but not least, as a special treat to anybody stopping by the blog here are some links to version of the Captain Capitalism cartoons for your I-pod. They are kind of big, and I am hosting them, so I don't know how long I can keep them up...but get em if you want em, while you can:

http://www.captaincapitalism.com/ipod/

Nightmare of a Red Christmas is done.

So, aside from a couple of tweaks, "Nightmare of a Red Christmas" is done.

I am not putting it up tonight, because I wanted a couple of other folks to get a first peek before I release it to the cold, unforgiving, world.

I want to thank Jennifer Anderson, Krishna Jain, Jason Williams and Sam Deats for helping me out with a bunch of the puppet animations. Everybody did a great job, and I could not have gotten this done on time without the help.

Also want to thank George Manley, Frank Gabriel, and Bruce Martin for the voicework.

I had a plan on this cartoon. The most important being getting it done in time to have it out and about by Dec 12. I can get a bit silly about deadlines, even self-imposed ones. I think it comes from working at the newspapers, where missing a deadline meant missing print and having a hole in the paper. I told myself that no matter what state the cartoon was in, today was gonna be the final day to work on it.

It takes a while for things to spread on the internet, and the holiday season is already upon us. Since this story has a Christmas theme, it was either get it up by now, or wait till next year. Since I wrote the next 3 chapters to this "serial" already, that would have been quite a setback.

I had intended to do a lot more drawings, and admittedly short cuts were taken to get the cartoon done on time. It is not perfect, but hopefully folks will dig it, and the cartoons will improve with every episode.

Speaking of which, this cartoon is the first of what I hope will be 6 chapters in a serial story. My goal is to finish them all this year, and release one every couple of months. We will see...

Powerhouse Christmas Party

Powerhouse had the annual Christmas party last weekend. Hopefully, a good time was had by all.

We have Powerhouse jackets...so that when we go out in public we can act like the Jets and Sharks and challenge other animation studios to turf wars. The newer members of the crew got their jackets at the party.

From L to R: Samuel Deats, Jessica Cuellar, Krishna Jain, Louie Granda and Cindy Crowell.

We had a "white elephant" gift exchange, which was fun. Here Krit and Jason Williams and Krishna Jain enjoy the festivities. By the way, Jason did not end up with the gumball machine...he ended up with the giant robot ninja.

Jennifer Anderson (here with husband Ryan) got a grab bag from the local Blue Genie Art Bazaar.

At the end of the party, everybody gathered for a Powerhouse photo.

(BACK ROW L to R: Frank Gabriel, Louie Granda, Bruce Tinnin, Jason Williams, Jessica Cuellar, and Jennifer Anderson, FRONT ROW L to R: Doug Beck, Krishna Jain, Vladmir Lenin, Cindy Crowell, and Sam Deats)

My wife went to San Franciso and all I got was jealous

So, my wife, Mandy went to San Francisco the week after Thanksgiving. She went to visit her brother who is a graduate student at Berkeley.

I am a bit jealous of part of the trip. She went to go have lunch with former Powerhouser, Vizlab buddy and all around good guy; Stephen Parker, (here he is with his girlfriend Carrie):

Steve lived with us here in Austin for a while. He is currently working for George Lucas on Skywalker ranch. Steve invited Mandy to lunch at Skywalker where she saw George Lucas in the flesh, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

I have not seen Steve in a long time. Hopefully, he will make it down to Austin soon.

She also saw seals.

Sitting in front a computer was much more fun.