Friday the 13th Part LXXCIVII: Jason vs. Ricky

It's your lucky day. I have two updates. Firstly, here's a clip from the show I'm working on at the Wild Brains. It's the Ricky Gervais podcast from a few years ago, but now, cartoonified! Cartoon Brew ran a clip a few days ago, and their readership faithfully generated a wonderfully diverse list of reasons to not like it. Tough crowd. As someone directly involved in the production of the show, I have empirically determined that it is funny. Of course it's because the original audio is funny, and the added visuals are designed to complement rather than upstage or detract from that, but this show is eliciting genuinely spontaneous laughter. The people building this cartoon are laughing - bitter, sullen animators, zombified, Avid-bound editors, and Kellman, don't get me started on Kellman - all actually laughing at this show despite being so close to it. That just doesn't happen. So if its making us laugh, then something must be working.

Secondly, I updated my website. After several days of tinkering, I can proudly say that I am now an expert at generating a window full of ActionScript 3 Compiler errors. But it works well enough that I can stop beating on it and call it done-ish. Plus, it's all modular, so if I ever make anything new again, my webpage will automatically sniff it out of the wild and seamlessly drop it into the appropriate gallery*. So check it out and get back to me. That's your job. Thanks.

Well, that was quick.

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. My current day job consumes nearly all my waking hours, so blogging got kicked on down the line along with the many other non-essential things in my life such as basic hygiene, interpersonal communication, etc... But my current gig is wrapping up, so here's the latest, and some not-so-the-latest.

Remember The Sloppy Seconds? The project that was moved from CN's shorts program to regular development? Yeah, well it dropped out of regular development. This was in early March. Not too surprising, since my boards plunged right into deep end of the TV-PG crib sheet I was given. More so than where CN probably wants to be. Besides, it was to be an animated cartoon, which by many accounts is something that makes CN nervous these days. So I own it outright now, and can shop it around. Anyone interested in a slam-dunk for a 15 to 30 y.o. male-skewed lowbrow physical-gag driven paradigm shift? Give my people a call.

In other news, my Thesis film was shown at USC's annual screening in March and also piqued some interest. The good kind. Hopefully something will come of it that I can put in a substantive post, but anything I write presently would be irresponsibly premature and wildly speculative. And as you regular readers know, that's a habit I'm trying to quit.

H.G. > F.G.? (and also some other news.)

So I just completed my first week over at Disney TV Animation. I'm working in the Frank G. Wells building, which seems to me just one initial off from being a far more fantastical and perilous workplace. Despite that, I'm in the development division, working on storyboards for show pilots created for the new XD channel. It's pretty fun, but I still don't know what the "XD" stands for. Rest assured, finding that out will be my first priority for week #2.

In other news, the short I pitched at Cartoon Network has been moved out of the Cartoonstitute shorts program and into "regular" development. I can't really comment on this further, because I have yet to meet with the new stewards of my show, but the only thing I know with any certainty is The Sloppy Seconds will not be made into a short. At least not in its current form.

I do hope the Cartoonstitute continues, though. The first batch of shorts produced both in-house and overseas was screened for the Flash crew recently, and word is they're looking good. Pringle and the crew are running a clinic on spinning straw into gold over there, raising the bar on what's possible with Flash. There's a wide variety of art direction among the shorts, and it seems Pringle is translating that into a variety of animation styles as well. It's cool to see them stretch out and show off where they can take things.

Rubber Scars returns

Anthony is bringing Rubber Scars back. The original podcast consisted of odd moments recounted by emotionless synthesized voices as though the speakers were unsettled by their memories, like robot radio theater of hypnogogic hallucinations. You probably missed it, which is too bad. The good news is, he's rebooting it in blog format. Check it here.

It Lives…

My Cartoonstitute™ storyboard pitch was today.

I stood before a Crush or Clobber or whatever the collective term for Development Executive is and pitched my short, The Sloppy Seconds, without once having to summon my mastery of jazz hands. I got a lot of laughs, which seemed to coincide with the jokes and gags in the board and not from my haircut or anything, so that was good.

The verdict? I got a solid Non-No, which means I haven't been cleared to go straight into production yet, but I also haven't been shut down. I've also apparently broken a short streak of flat-out "No's", so I'll take that as a positive.

Thanks to everyone who crossed their fingers for me and a special shout-out goes to the guy who sacrificed the chicken. I do appreciate it.

Subversion City

Dear Interwebs, that previous description (now deleted) about my kiddy cartoon in-the-works being "like The Tin Drum, only more upsetting" was a joke. I mean, c'mon people, really?

But regardless, it has been brought to my attention that the speculative echo chamber of the blogospere may be starting to cement this little red herring into fact. So just for the record, my cartoon will be completely devoid of characters willing themselves into Dwarfism, Polish street thugs, percussion instruments, or any traces of the Third Reich. Although at least three of those elements do sound like a winning combination for capturing that tender and elusive 6-12 y.o. demographic.

Anyways, sorry for misleading anyone earlier. I'll post some info about the short as soon as I have something postable. Until then, I think I can safely reveal that it's tentatively titled The Sloppy Seconds. No joking.

In development

Hey, here's a brief update. The idea I pitched to the shorts program at Cartoon Network (The Cartoonstitute) was given the go-ahead to move on to storyboards, which I've just completed. So, next up is the board pitch, which is currently scheduled for an unspecified time in the near future. If that goes well and doesn't conclude with me falling through the trap door in the floor of development's conference room, then I actually get to direct my own one-off short cartoon at the studio! Purty cool.