Beat obessesion and Chuck Jones' brilliant longterm salespeople

I am a little behind on the cartoons I am making. I was supposed to finish one of the four animatics this weekend. I was going to try edit all the sound and draw all the layouts and boards too. I still have not finished all the sound.

One day earlier in the week, I was blog surfing and made a stop at Gabe Swarr's blog. Mr. Swarr is a great Flash director and had posted a short, and the animatic for the short. In the animatic he had a neat little graphic symbol that apparently was being used to keep track of the beat. I had never thought of doing that, and so I made one to use in the animatics I was making. It was a brilliant idea. But I might have become over obsessed with it.

I used to play drums. Recently I have fallen back into playing, not real drums, but the wife and I have been playing Rock Band. When I first saw the game, I kind of scoffed at it. But just like the genius of the Chuck Jones sales people, in the second part of this blog, the folks behind Rock Band knew the Achilles heel of former drummers/consumers my age. Rock band has Rush songs. Tom Sawyer, sir. All drummers in my day tried to talk their bands into playing Tom Sawyer. Not because it was a great song, but because it was all drums.

I might be over doing it, but it has been really fun trying to make the cartoon have a genuine rhythm to it, without making it obvious. I have even gone so far to do time compression on the sound effects and music to make everything land on the beats.

Also this weekend, I got my Chucks Jones figure drawing back from the framer.

10 years ago, on our honeymoon, Mandy and I went to the Chuck Jones gallery in Sante Fe. I spent a good long time in the gallery looking throught drawings, wearing little gloves going through stacks of paper, trying to find something I could afford. I really wanted to purchase this print of figure drawing of Chuck Jones' wife, but being a newly married graduate student, I could only afford a signed copy of Chuck Amuck.

A few days after we got back from the honeymoon, I got a letter from the gallery. Inside the envelope was a note from my childhood hero that congratulated us on our wedding.

There was also a picture of Mr. Jones and his wife, and in what I assumed was a brilliant sales tactic; the picture was taken in front of the figure drawing the sale person knew I wanted so badly.

It took 10 years, but apparently it worked. Mandy got the drawing for me for our anniversary. And it now hangs downstairs.