Stussy Puts the Violence Back Into Cartoons!

Hey I drew some more shirt designs for Stussy and the brilliant and innovative art director, Adam Jay Weissman asked me to make a cartoon to advertise it. Rather than just do a pure ad, I asked if I could make a little story and embed the ad in it. He said ok so here it is:

SEE THE CARTOON HERE

BEHIND THE SCENES SECRETS:

I Drew the storyboards with ball point pen on a crappy newsprint sketchbook.
Then I animated the cartoon on a cintiq using Toonboom's Animate program. It's primarily hand drawn with a few tweening cheats - and some afterfx in the middle by Kedz.

I worked with my core team of miscreants here in Northridge.

JOHN KEDZIE coordinated, did all the technical crap that I hate to do and even found time to create some cg stuff and animate it.
SARAH HARKEY was my main assistant animator and she also painted the tasty backgrounds:

SANDRA RIVAS joined us just a couple weeks ago and assisted and colored much animation.

DIVERSITY IN CARTOONLAND

I have also been training a virtual team of talented cartoonists around the world who have been doing assistant animation.

GENEVA HODGSON did some fine inking and coloring and inbetweening up in San Francisco.

AMIR AVNI (of Toronto) jumped in the pool at the last minute of production to help ink.

DAVID DE ROOIJ took time away from tempting Krampus to do some assisting in Holland.

BEN ANDERS played hookey from Sheridan College to clean up some scenes.

The great Eric Bauza and the manly Jim Smith did the voices of my characters. Eddie Cruz (owner of Stussy LA and Undefeated) provided the 'tude and the voice of the Stussy Rat.

If you like the cartoon, show your love by buying a shirt from Stussy and maybe they will sponsor a series of 'em!

Of course if you hate it, then you'll have no choice but to beat the bejeezus out of me in the parking lot at Target.
and we used music from the famous

http://www.apmmusic.com/

library.

Get Toonboom's Animate Program cheap today

Hey if you want to get a good animation program cheap I just saw that "Animate" is on sale today.) They aren't paying me to advertise, I just get emails from them every time they have a sale.

I switched from Harmony to "Animate" because it's not only way cheaper, but it's easier to use. Well "easier" is relative; it still has some screwy tools and menus - like "copy and paste" doesn't work the way it does in every other program on earth.

But I've been showing Uncle Eddie how to use it and he is all excited about how quickly you can animate something and see it played back with beautiful lines and stuff. It is definitely a lot more artist friendly than Goddamn Flash.

I may be doing a workshop soon for people who would like to learn how to cleanup, lay out, animate or assist in my style, using "Animate". I'll tell you about it as soon as I work out the details with Taafi.

Toon Boom Animation: Toon Boom Animate Professional Animation Software

There's the link above.

Toby and Skip by Harmke

Toby & Skip: Smells like trouble from Harmke Pasterkamp on Vimeo.

Here's my pal Harmke's cartoon she made in cute school. She did it all in ToonBoom Animate (which works the same way as Harmony, only is a lot cheaper)

and you can find some of her PRODUCTION ART here:and of course there has to be

the TOBY AND SKIP OFFICIAL FACEBOOK PAGE

Harmke has also done excellent inking for me.

We would work together more if only Toon Boom would make their damn animation software compatible with itself!
Here's the Amsterdam cartoon unit: Mitch, Harmke and David. They gave me the tour and we ate minced meat together.

Simpsons Amid Interview-Longwinded Answers pt 1

AMID: 1.) First things first, what's the backstory here? How did you end up animating a Simpsons opening?

Matt Groening and Al Jean asked me to do it. They showed me an opening that Banksy did that satirized the animation production assembly line system in Korea and told me it was really popular, so they wanted to do something similar with me.

Storyboard
At first they just wanted me to do a storyboard and have their regular crew animate it. If we had done it that way, then no one would even have known that I had anything to do with it because it would have ended up on model and all pose to pose. I showed them the Adult Swim shorts I had been doing and pointed out that the way things happened was even more important than what was happening in my work. You can’t write visual performance. You have to actually draw it.














to be continued...

Watch Adult Swim

Click the pic to see the flick

assisted by:
Jojo Baptista
Tommy Tanner
Geneva Hodgson

CG Moon, Stars, FX: Paul Griswold

Camera and tech help: Alex Vassilev

English voice by Auralynn When, Japanese voice by Hitomi Griswold

Thanks to Jason DeMarco and Mike Lazzo

...and the helpful folks at Toonboom, Karina, J.R. Ron, Bernard

I hope I spelled everyone's name right...

Soon

I have some new theories about animating eyes but someone else is going to tell you about them soon.

SALE ON TOON BOOM ANIMATION PROGRAMS

I'd recommend the second product on that page "Toon Boom Animate" for $699 if you are just starting. It has great ink and paint tools and it's pretty easy to animate in.

The Adult Swim Talking Eyeball Mascot

Imagine my delight when Adult Swim approached me and asked if I could create a talking eyeball for them.

I was experimenting with animating various ways in Harmony, sometimes using keyframing and digital tricks but it was more fun drawing the animation straight ahead like this.
Once I had my rough layout poses registered in Harmony, I just went ahead and drew each animation drawing one at a time.
I just kept scrubbing the sound track and matching the drawings to the accents in the dialogue.
The brush tool is pretty easy to use and I didn't worry about making mistakes because I could play each bit of animation back instantly to see if it worked.
If something didn't work right, instead of trying to draw over it and fix a certain drawing and ending up with a scribbly mess, I just deleted it and drew another from scratch.


What's fun about animating this way is that as you start to get comfortable with a scene, you get braver too.

You can see how conservative the scene starts out as I was a chicken Willie worried that I might get caught having fun.










Once I figured out how easy it is to just delete something and redraw it I started to get a little more exaggerated as I went along. No one was looking over my shoulder except my assistant Tommy, who couldn't fire me for not tracing model sheets, though he probably wanted to.





I was surprised by no matter how much I distorted the drawings and how few inbetweens I used I still was able to get the animation to play smoothly.
It kinda made me mad that I didn't go further.
















I actually animated the nose before I animated the eye and I used keys and inbetweens, and that didn't turn out as smooth.
It looks more start and stop or pose to pose like most TV cartoons.



I think the great thing about being able to animate so fast and playing it back as you go, that you naturally become more confident and daring.
If I could get enough animators to do this, it wouldn't be long before the way cartoons moved would be a lot freer and inventive.
We might stop thinking of character designs as "assets" to be artificially manipulated like puppets around the screen.





I'm hoping this eyeball will become Adult Swim's Tony the Tiger or Kim Kardasian's butt. If not, I'll have to create some animated ear convolutions next.

I did use some sneaky digital animation tricks in this spot too, like keyframing and even morphing for Cripe's sake. I can post some of that crap too if you are curious.

BTW, if you wanna use Harmony yourself, I suggest you buy Animate or Animatepro first. They do the same things as Harmony but are more affordable. Harmony is really for studios, not individuals.