Captain Capitalism on Comedy Central

Things have been crazy busy lately. I took that from the chapter on "6 approved opening sentences to a blog," in my blogging book. It is very helpful.

I am way behind on the cartoons I wanted to make at home this year, but I am back to plodding along on the animatic this week.

I was out of town the last couple weekends for Mother's Day et al, and then last week I was getting "Piggybank Pinko" ready for TV. Atomfilms, who originally hosted the cartoon its first week out is making a "collection of shorts" show on Comedy Central sometime in the near future, and wanted to use the cartoon in the show. I had to do a lot of work just to export the piece for TV. For you Flash folks, I had all the audio buried in movieclips, as opposed to being on the main timeline. Ah, youth. It is hard for me to watch these older cartoons sometimes, I have done so much work on the design since then, and don't really have animation to show for it. I will let folks know here when that is going to run.

You can still watch the cartoon here.
The cartoon kind of has a new life thanks to the Tax rebate:

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14407
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/04/25/captain-capitalism-on-why-saving-is-bad-for-america/#comments

Now, while I wasnt trying to prognosticate the current recesssion and relief plan when I wrote the cartoon in 2005; I have to say, my silly little cartoon works better now. So, thank you housing bubble.

Now go spend your tax rebate on some Captain Capitalism merchandise. I am promise not to save any of the profits.

Alabama costumes and choco-bacon

Here are some sketches of the Alabama boys, the sketches are rough, and just to get ideas for the clothes. The outfits are loosely based on a combo of S.H.I.E.L.D agents and Starwars.

This week I am hoping to start animating some scenes of this exercise in sillyness.

This weekend Mandy and I went to see Carmen at the Austin Lyric Opera. I have always really liked the music in Carmen, but as I was watching the story unfold it suddenly hit me that Opera is very much like Anime cartoons. In its storytelling, it tends to focus on the "pretty things" and accentuating interesting minor details, it does not focus or even really concern itself much with plot. I would say that does not work well for me, but since I am working on a cartoon about 80's country music stars in space... I can't say too much.

Mandy and I also went to Austin's Dragon Boat races on Saturday with our friends, Brandon and his wife Becky. If you live in the area you should check it out. Freescale and Motorola and various other companies with Asian roots race Dragon Boats on LadyBird Lake, and they have various other cultural exhibits.

Also, in our travels this weekend we hit a candy store that had Chocolate Covered Bacon. Normally, I am open to all kinds of strange cuisine, but this sounded nasty. But Brandon dared me, and I have low self-esteem apparently. I would like to say it was not what you would expect, but it was. Brandon tried some too...

Stupid Hippies

This picture was taken at a rally in San Francisco protesting the Beijing Olympics:


It makes me laugh and cry at the same time.

Oak Ridge Boys designs

Wherever I go, people ask me the same question... I'll be at the Sanrio store, looking at the latest Hello Kitty colored pencils or trying to enjoy a nice quiet meal at Chick-Fil-A, and sure enough some member of the "public" will come up to me an ask:

"Brad, if the Oak Ridge Boys were animated intergalatic pirates, with costumes lightly based on obscure Marvel comics characters and 80's films...what would they look like?"

Well, you can all finally leave me alone now.

Their baby is American Made. Born and bred in the USA. From her silky long hair, to her sexy long legs. Their baby is American Made.

I have a dream...

This is something I have been thinking about recently.

There needs to be a non-Youtube/Atomfilms etc. place for animators to post Flash and FLV versions of cartoon and also Flash games that uses the "micro-payment" method that many online games are using now, and that Itunes uses.

The way it would work is like this; You sign up, enter your credit card/paypal info when you join, and each time you watch a full cartoon you put in your log-in and pay 25-50cents...like a little ticket to see the film.

You could watch some Flash games and cartoons for free, and watch snippets of them all for "style research." This might keep people coming around. Animation companies can put their commercials and reels up for free, if they have client permission also. Animators could link to their blogs and show the production process, and through their blogs link to merchandising etc.

Contests/Battles could be hosted by the site, like "create an animation about X," and the site needs to be owned/managed/figure-headed by someone with a name in animation so they could use their name and wiles to try to get more popular cartoonists to participate, attracting a larger audience.

Most of the time sites like this have not worked because of a lack of content or exploitation of the creator and their intellectual property rights, or not having enough of a community to keep new and quality content to attract folks to pay for it.

It needs to be run by a group that loves, will nuture, and look out for the creator.

I know there are many animators who are yearning to be free from the barrage of unfair online contests. I know artists who are distraught by sites that host their hardwork, and seem to only have the goal of generating overly harsh comments while the artist makes no profit. And I know artists who outside of their jobs only have so much time, so they are failing at generating content, simply because you have to do so much more than just create cartoons- to put cartoons up and to generate interest; let alone profit.

I think the keys would be:
-Artists keep their rights, 100%. The site just gets the right to display it for a certain term and generate the revenue. That way if the artist is smart he wont put the cartoon up anywhere else for free...but keeps the rights, and maybe be able to sell it later.
-The site can reject content and will have quality and content standards.
-revenue is split 50-50 on every cent, from the first one that is made
-people can rate, and leave comments- but that will not be the focus of the site. The cartoons will be the focus, not the "community"
-the page will put ads up on the site, but not in the cartoons, or before the cartoons...more like banners etc. Owners of site get all revenue from ads except in the below:
-owners of site will try to find folks to sponsor contests and cartoons, to make John K's dream of sponsored shows come true.

This might sound like Newgrounds to some, but it is different. First of all Newgrounds is all free, and while I love Tom and the fine folks at Newgrounds, it focuses on the community, and the rating, and the average content is not at the level I am thinking here. I am thinking that the owners of this site would look at submissions first, and try to keep things less than X rated, and at a certain quality level.

The dream would be that after a a term in which money is generated, the directors of the site could use capital to see certain creators to make a cartoon for the site, which since they helped sponsor would be viewable at a reduced rate. Companies like Adobe could sponsor contests, where the prize could be a full copy of Flash...and everybody uses a 30-day trial to make the animations. etc.

At one point I thought Cartoon Retro, with Lily and Finch, Bob Gomp, Rufus and Horny, and Forestland might be the Moses to lead us to the promised land...but although I still pay my $5 per month, I have not seen any animation. I don't know what happened there. Not dissing on anyone, just saying I thought it was a good idea...and this kind of expands on that.

Any talented people or venture capitalists out there that want to help me make this happen?

Deat's Feats

Sam Deats , Powerhouse's resident Photoshop ninja and all around happy fella did this nifty drawing of Captain Capitalism. Pretty awesome, huh?

7 years

In other news, on April Fool's Day, Powerhouse will celebrate it’s 7th Anniversary. Pretty hard to imagine it has been that long since Bruce, Frank and I signed the "doing business as" papers at the courthouse.

Here are the 3 of us, back in 2001 at our first office:
Hehe…tools.

Here we are now...

And here is the new 2008 crew. We have come a long way.

Happy Anniversary everybody! Thanks to everyone for making it a great 7 years! Here's to 7 more!

Animaticizing

I don’t have a lot of cartoon stuff to post still. I have been working hard on the Alabama in Space storyboards/animatic, but don’t have a lot of “post-able” images. I am kind of going overboard on the animatic. This is because I know the final cartoon won’t have a ton of animation. Making animated cartoons, in your spare time, by yourself does not really allow for a lot of animation; that is if you want to have any kind of life, or don’t want your wife to leave you. Also, I would rather make a few quick cartoons per year than some magnum opus of animation. I probably only get an hour-or-so per day to work on these silly cartoons, if I am lucky. If I am going to accomplish I have to cut some corners.

Since the cartoons won’t have awesome animation, I am concentrating on layouts and beats in the animatic. I am doing boards really rough, and trying to apply a lot of thought to the layout. I am using the Spumco layout notes and Brad Bird’s King of the Hill notes a lot. I have also been looking at Will Eisner’s books on comics, and have been looking at a lot of comic cover art to get really over the top dynamic layouts. This cartoon’s concept is so silly that I think it makes it even funnier to put this much thought into such a stupid concept. Considering the subject manner making dynamic layouts is pretty ludicrous.

Since I have no images, here are some photos:

Here’s me in the boxing class that I did the caricatures of the teacher for:

This photo was taken by the very talented Ms. Licarone:

Here are some pics of a trip I made with Mandy to a petting zoo recently in Johnson City.