New Year, 2009

I realized that I have not made a post in 2009. It has been a crazy year so far. Things have been very busy. Powerhouse Animation now employs 40 people. Hard to imagine that an office that was once four guys in a small office that reeked of bat guano would come this far. Here's to hoping that the economic meltdown continues to stay away from our doorstep.

New Years is probably my favorite holiday. I think I have said this before, but I am a bit of a list making addict. So I enjoy doing resolutions and making goals every New Year. The past several years I have made 100 resolutions, and then I see how many I can cross off before the next year.

This years goals include doing 3 Captain Capitalism cartoons by the end of the year. I have been working on a new cartoon, "Culture Clubbing." I have not gotten as much done as my resolution schedule allowed, but am trying to catch up. I don't want to get into details but it has been a tough few months.

Another goal is to finally make a good sculpt of Captain Capitalism and get a vinyl/resin toy made to try to sell with one of the cartoons. I decided to try to make it a bank to make it fit the theme. In order to actually accomplish this goal, I decided to quit trying to do it myself, and hired Mike Petryszak to make the sculpt. Check out Mike's work here. I am extremely exicted about Mike working on this.

I did some rough turnarounds for him to work from, here are a couple of 'em:

I asked Sam Deats to do a painting of one of the angles of the turnaround so that we could see what the statue might look like, and I thought I would share it:

In other news, Ralph Baskhi was in town. I gotta be honest, based on stories I have heard, I was expecting a raging mad man, but he was a downright nice. He is a fascinating and well spoken man. He talked at the Austin School of Film. One of the more interesting things that he talked about as how animators should live in the present, and make cartoons about things that are going on now. He said that too much attention is paid to the past in animation, and that too much time is wasted pining for the way things used to be, and analyzing cartoons from 40 years ago. It was very interesting to hear one of animation's elder statesman talk about this.

This year I have some non-cartoon related goals, too. Brandon and I have started a Kendo class at the University of Texas. Now I have a different kind of class almost everyday of the week now. Each week I take boxing, wrestling, Kickboxing, and jiu-jitsu, and now Kendo. I also still kung-fu every once in a while, though not as much as I did in the past.

Mandy and I are headed to New York in the morning. I have some meetings and we are going to take advantage of being in town by catching some plays in the evening. Hopefully, for my own memories, I will have a chance to do a "travel blog" for the trip.

I need to figure out what I have done to my blog here, some of the old links no longer work and it is no longer posting the images at the sizes that I set it up for... it does not appear you can click on these images to see them larger. I'll try to fix this later.

Anyway thanks for stopping by...