Just checking in

Whoosh. So much going on lately. I'm frazzled. I haven't had time to post here much, as there's so much to do. My day job, working on a new prime time series for Fox Television animation is extremely fun, but also a lot of work.

This weekend my wife is in New Jersey, doing a stage play performance with her theatre troupe. So I'm spending a a nice, quiet and productive weekend here at home, working on my current book. Tomorrow (Sunday) I'm going over to Mike's and we'll spend much of the day working out some more Jackalope Boyz ideas, so the whole concept will be ready to pitch.

I'm amazed that our little cartoon seems to be holding its own on Cartoon Monsoon. Someone out there must like it! I've gotten a lot of emails from people saying they enjoyed it- hey and it's really cool some of you bother to post a comment now and then on this blog. As always, we love hearing from people, and knowing what folks think.

Next weekend I have something highly unusual planned. I'm going to meet with someone I haven't seen in 25+ years. Namely my dad. I don't know what to think really. I'm just going to have an open mind, and see how it goes. It'll be interesting if anything else. My dad probably doesn't know much about me. I don't know much about his life of the past three decades either. He contacted my mom, in order to get in touch with me, since he'll be in California on vacation. I'm really looking forward to seeing him.

Funny how these things work out sometimes. Never a dull moment!

Cartoon Monsoon Season 2 Site

As someone astutely pointed out to me today, we are in fact winning and I, for one, can't believe it! First to last to first again is mighty nice.

The contest itself is a long and arduous one though. We could lose our lead at any time so keep voting. The first round was won by a friend of ours Joe Orrantia who won for Edgar and the Voyagers and the 2nd round is what we're competing for now. We aim to win. IF we win, we'll go head to head with Edgar and another cartoon, the winner of the "wild card " round which will be determined by a contest between the "losers" of round ONE and TWO.

Then sometime in November, The Winner of Round ONE, Round TWO and the Wild card Round will compete to win for the final winning of Cartoon Monsoon Season II!

Sound complicated? It is but all you really need to know is to just keep voting for The Jackalope Boyz!

Please help us to win! Keel voting!

Cartoon Monsoon Season 2 Site

Jackalope Boyz part Deux

Finally the story can be told! The Jackalope Boyz part 2 will be online Monday! Will the Jacks get out of that nasty pot the blue-haired nannies put them in? Will Klauss Vegas get the White Elephant? And what of lil' baby genius Arriba? Will someone EVER change him? Tune in Monday on Cartoon Monsoon and find out!

We're in FIRST place!

It's in first place! The Jackalope Boyz is in first place! Cooooooooooooool!
At least for now! Yeah baby! So I guess our posting and annoying everyone I know pays off! Keep voting people! Keep voting!

The other day I emailed Jerry Beck at CartoonBrew and he was kind enough to put up a link to The Jackalope Boyz cartoon. I've checked the stats and my site has gotten a huge amount of hits from that one site. I can only imagine what kind of hits they get on a daily basis! Anyway, if you're refferred from there say hi!

I love this blogging stuff. Eight years ago we made a few cartoons for Hanna Barbera and they had a contest as well but there was really no way to get the word out there and let people know we were in a contest. I guess I could have mailed a letter but I only had so many addresses and family was gonna vote anyway. Now with the Web I've posted to various weblogs and User forums and have gotten hits from that already! I only wish that I could know if they're voting for it or hate it. Jacks is in first place today but who knows tomorrow. It seems to only be updated each day so I guess we'll see what happens tomorrow. Wish us luck and of course... VOTE!

Don't Forget...

...to vote!

No, not just for one of those two guys running in that other race... but for Jackalope Boyz on Brother's Cartoon Monsoon website!

A Flash program for Animators?

Link:fwak! blog
Wow! So after all these years Macromedia is finallty going to make a new version of their much-acclaimed software specifically for animators/designers. Here's a blurb from an email going around to developers:
Finally! After three seasons of Mucha Lucha, we are very relieved and excited to learn that a new version of Flash for Animators/Designers is in development! In a recent email received from Mike Downey of Macromedia Inc.:

... I'm happy to tell you that we're in the early stages of defining the next version of Flash, code-named "8ball", and will be focusing the release on animators, multimedia designers, and digital artists. We have a lot of features in mind, but one of the biggest areas that we are having difficulty defining is video export from Flash. We understand that there are limitations in our Quicktime exporter (which I understand is necessary for exporting to broadcast television). One of these limitations is the fact that we don't support exporting nested movieclips. Several experienced developers in your industry have told us that they must export from Flash as SWF and then import into Director MX 2004 as SWF, then export from Director as Quicktime - just to get nested movieclips recognized on export. We obviously want to fix this for the next release.

So, I'd really like to get your feedback. I couldn't help but notice your comment about each release of Flash moving away from your use of it - and I don't disagree. The next product release is being managed by an entirely new team of long-time Flash and graphics experts (unlike the last release) and we are all super-determined to return Flash to it's roots and make it much better for designers and animators. We may not be able to do everything within the next release, but we definitely have Flash back on track for the future. Luckily we created Macromedia Flex to target traditional application developers so we no longer need to stretch the Flash authoring tool into a completely different direction than what it was built for.

In any case, I look forward to your feedback....

Cool, huh?

Jackalope Boyz Website

Check out the Jackalope Boyz Website!

The History of the Bullbarians

The character featured in our first two books, Ribeye the Bullbarian, has a creation history that dates back quite a few years. Mike Milo drew the very first conceptual sketches of Ribeye in 1990. We had written a comic book story called 'The Bullbarian Incident' and Ribeye was a central character in it, along with a whole gang of Bullbarians. Actually, the character wasn't known as Ribeye at all in those days; his name was T-Bone the Bullbarian.

The first 'T-Bone the Bullbarian' sketches, 1990.

We always liked the idea of the 'Bullbarian' age. We always pictured it with comic books in mind, as both of us were fans of comic books like 'Conan the Barbarian', 'Asterix', 'Groo the Wanderer', 'Usagi Yojimbo' and others.

T-Bone's appearance began to shift a bit through the 1990's as the project remained a back-burner idea. T-Bone's little brother Cubesteak was created around 1993 when we prepared the concept as a series for television. We felt that shifting the focus to the story of a big brother looking out for his younger brother was more interesting than the usual 'sword and sorcery' fare.

'T-Bone' redesign from the mid 1990's. Mike and I worked at Hanna-Barbera studios at the time, and were greatly influenced by the 'house' design style.

A very Hanna-Barbera styled Cubesteak.

A mid 1990's 'Ren and Stimpy'-esque 'T-Bone' and Cubesteak.

Disney came out with a show that featured a character named T-Bone, and so we changed the character's name to Ribeye around the time I started writing the first book. It's funny how those things work. I thought of the character as T-Bone for so long that was just who he was, and suddenly to have to change his name didn't seem right. But now I find it odd to refer to the character as T-Bone. Ribeye just fits.

Ribeye's current design is actually one of the earliest. We ditched all the 1990's redesign versions, and went back to an earlier design that just seemed to be the 'true' character.

Business As Usual

I haven't written much lately on here, been extremely busy. There's a lot going on lately. I'm pouring every available minute I can spare into writing my new book, and doing some editing chores on the last one which needs to go to press A.S.A.P. The preview of the Jackalope Boyz is up at Warner Brother's site, in the Cartoon Monsoon section.

I haven't seen the finished version of the Jacks cartoon yet, with all the added music and sound effects, but hopefully we'll see it sometime this week.

I've been busy as a bee at my job lately at Fox Television Animation; we're gearing up to work on a new prime time show that will premiere after the Super Bowl around the last week in January.

Mike is in busy development over at Warner Brothers, and dealing with the frustrations of trying to deal with conflicting executive control issues and all the usual politics that go with the business. The good news in all of it is: there's some truly amazing stuff on the horizon! To see an example of one of Mike's earlier development efforts for Warner Brothers, check out Swaroop.