Back From Mexico

We got back from beautiful San Felipe, Mexico last week, after a week of fun in the sun. My wife and I had a great time south of the border.


Aside from sipping pina coladas on the beach, I did manage to do a little bit of writing as well. I added some needed elements to my latest book, Badhat, as well as fleshed out a new short story.

The water here was as warm as a hot tub!

Eventually, I want to release a book of short stories. There are so many tales I have that aren't really suited for full novels, but are perfect short stories. Mike has also been writing a lot lately as well.

As always, it's great to be back in the states, but the wife and I enjoyed sunning ourselves on the beach in Mexico greatly.

San Felipe is quiet this time of year, which suited us just fine. At one point, we went sailboating around the bay. Since it was 110 degrees in the shade, we spent a lot of time in the pool, or in the ocean. The Sea of Cortez was as warm as a hot tub too!

This time of year, the tide goes out in the late afternoon, leaving a variety of aquatic life wading in tidal pools. In this region, the tidal changes are very drastic. When the tide was out, the sea retreats a great distance from the beach, making you question that it really could have been so far up on the beach.

We both can't wait to go back to San Felipe in the near future. Anyone looking to escape the cities of Southern Cali and feel that you've really gone somewhere far, far away that normally you'd have to fly to- that's in reality only a few hours drive, I highly recommend San Felipe.

PLANETARY PIG STORYBOARDS

As an "add-in" to Harry's post... you can now also view a full Planetary Pig storyboard online.
It's a big flie; 16mb and you will need Adobe's free Acrobat reader, but ya never know... you might find it's worth it!

PLANETARY PIG STORYBOARDS

Planetary Pig

Planetary Pig is a character Mike and I began developing back in the early 1990's. We produced a pencil test of the idea in 1992. It was shot using a pencil test animation system that Mike owned, that shot frame-by-frame on VHS tapes. The system was very crude- without a flying erase head. Therefore, you couldn't have gaps in the tape. This meant that if you wanted to shoot an entire piece, it had to be done in one pass, with no breaks in shooting between scenes.

This entire little mini-film was shot in a single marathon pass- consider that 12 frames of drawings stacked on top of each other are clicking past every second. It took us over 14 hours to shoot. Add to the frustration, we couldn't allow the camcorder we used as an animation stand camera to sit idle for more than five minutes, or it would turn itself off and ruin a scene.

We had to have been a little bit insane to even attempt making entire pencil test films this way, but we were determined to get the idea onto video, and this was in an era before affordable desktop computers.


Nowadays, one has merely to purchase any mid-range personal computer, and it will handle animation tasks fine. In the early 90's, the only such computers were barely up to the task, and one that would actually do the job would run you about $5,000-$10,000. The same computer today, you wouldn't even want to use for a doorstop! How times have changed!

You can watch the original film by clicking on the rocket launcher:


Planetary Pig is a guy who'll do just about any menial job that outer space has to offer. Whether that's selling ice cream cones on the surface of the sun, or sweeping launch pads for high-tech space companies, Planetary Pig was up for the task. His problem was simply that he could never leave well enough alone. He envisioned himself as something of a great inventor, able to improve on other people's ideas, and he'd never miss an opportunity to try and prove it, usually with disastrous results.

We pitched Planetary Pig to Nickelodeon and Hanna Barbera in 1993. H&B liked it enough to put us into their shorts program, so I can't say that something good didn't come out of it.

Another Week Slips Past

Time really flies! I can't believe another week is now history. I hardly noticed it as it was happening. That's how busy life has been lately.

Perhaps things will slow down a bit this month. I'm finally on a much-needed hiatus from my job at Fox Television Animation where I work as an Editor on the show American Dad. The first season is in the can. Our second season begins for me in mid-August, but until then, I can kick back.

This past week I helped Mike Milo rebuild a computer system. During the move of his studio Milowerx, he somehow managed to 86 one of his computer systems, and had to replace it. Unfortunately, it was the machine where he stored much of his current 3D work.

So we went to Frys Electronics, picked up a new motherboard and processor, took the parts out of his old computer, and rebuilt a brand new one with the new components.

Of course it didn't go off without major hitches. First- we assembled everything, and switched the machine on. Nothing happened. Mike said the same had happened to him before. I figured it couldn't be the new components, so it had to be the one piece of equipment with the ability to tank two different CPUs- the graphic card. We pilfered another card out of another system, and the system worked. Well, sort-of.

It took a bit of jumping through hoops to get an operating system installed, as Mike couldn't find his Windows XP disks.

Long story short, it was a fun experience. I've always enjoyed tinkering with computer equipment. If I wasn't in the animation business, I'd definitely work as some sort of computer troubleshooter.

During my hiatus, I have a number of projects to keep me busy, both professional, and personal. This weekend, my wife and I worked on some home improvement projects, and a few of our own creative endeavors.

I'm posting this, and I'm off to bed! I love that I can wake up in the morning, glance over at the whining alarm clock, and have a laugh as I smack it off, and go snuggle back to sleep!

Drawing Comix!

This weekend I've been busy writing a new comic book series that we've been planning. Neither Mike or myself have drawn comic books in well over a decade. But over the years, we've both often said, "Hey, let's do another comic!" Somehow, we just never got around to it... until now.

I've also been prepping the first of several future volumes of our old Zaptoons comics from the 1990's. I plan to begin republishing them in a series of collections starting early next year.

The trick is in preparing all the old artwork for press, which means scanning hundreds of comic book pages by hand. No easy feat, and quite tedious, but it's still a lot of fun.

To the left is a page from a 1992 issue of Zaptoon Tales, featuring a character called Charlie Hippo. Charlie was a comic series we began drawing back in the late 1980's while still in art school. The adventure stories we wrote and drew starring Charlie are some of my favorite creations.

Of course these weren't the greatest comics ever, but we had a blast drawing them. Mainly, we did them to amuse ourselves. Best of all, the challenge of drawing our own comic book series taught us a lot. Our goal was just to learn as much as we could about the art of storytelling. Drawing comic strips is actually a very good way to hone one's skills as a storyteller. The comic page forces an author to tell a story in as efficient a way possible, as one can't use endless panels to get the point across.

As with most undertakings, one never knows where may end up. What started as a simple lesson to learn more about telling stories, ended up with us landing a gig writing and drawing comic books for 20th Century Fox for the first issues of Simpsons comics. We could never have taken that gig on without the knowledge and experience we'd gathered creating our own comic books.

New Milowerx site design

Lately I've been busy helping Mike Milo revamp his Milowerx site. Since Milowerx Animation Studios is the sister site to Zaptoons, we wanted the two to have a similar look to one another. Web design is something I've come to enjoy greatly, and I'm still struggling to learn it. Now if only Dreamweaver would play nice now and then, life would be great.

Meanwhile, I've also done some tweaking of the Zaptoons website. Every time I mess with building on other sites, I figure out things I want to do to change this site. Though most of the changes are only minor cosmetics for now, in the coming days I'll be adding some new features, so stay tuned.

I have one more week of work at Fox TV Animation before I get a two month hiatus. Needless to say I'm looking forward to that! What will I do with two whole months off? Well, much of the time may already be filled with a new project Mike and I are about to take on. I can't mention the details yet, until we've finalized things, but this project looks like it will be a lot of fun.

My wife Leila and I have a trip planned this month to San Felipe, in Baja California, Mexico. We're going in the middle of the week, when we hope the beaches will be empty, and we can't wait to go. This site gives a brief description of the attractions of this tranquil place south of the border:
"If you haven't been to the eastern shore of northern Baja, you're missing something special. Between the San Pedro Martir mountains and the tranquil blue Sea of Cortez is the fishing village of San Felipe (sahn feh-LEE-peh). It's a place of natural beauty just 120 miles south of the border at Mexicali/Calexico. It has sunny skies, gentle evening breezes, and bathtub-warm ocean waters that can reach 86-87 degrees in August."

Works for me! Consulting my crystal ball, I predict several relaxing days on the beach, sipping margaritas and unwinding.

Meanwhile, Leila is off to San Francisco this weekend to visit some of her friends there, while I hold down the fort in Los Angeles, and do some layout work on a new comic book project Mike and I are writing even as you read this.