Making Sense of the 21st Century

I just released my portfolio site’s upgrade last Tuesday and alread it’s received a design award. Design Licks, a great web design portal that picks “the greatest sites on the web”, has dubbed us “Site of the Day”. We’ll be on it’s front page for the entire month of June. Not bad for only seven days in operation.

Update: Probably due to a snowball effect of appearing on one site, more and more design sites are recognizing Bad Monkey Studios - many in Japan and Europe too. We’re on the front page of The Best Designs, Pixel Gangerster, Kayac Designer’s Blog, Flash Mania, and Web Trend Awards. We’re also #9 on Design Charts‘ top 40 list. Pinch me, I’m dreaming! On the tush, even!

My new animated short “Watch Out Obama” has been released and can be found at www.watchoutobama.com . The short is based on the unbelievable comments made by Hillary Clinton in regards to the RFK assassination ending the 68 Democratic primary. Many say it was an exhausted slip of the tongue, but she’d said it to Time Magazine two months earlier. Anyway, watch it, enjoy it, and share it.

It’s really tough to do animation about current events. Especially good animation. It took me 15 minutes to write, but four days of 9am-3am animating to complete. This despite the fact that I chose a UPA style of illustration specifically to make the animating process quicker and simpler.

There have been a select few who have seen parts of my new Bad Monkey Portfolio site in action, but for the most part it’s been top secret. However, there are some bits that I find hard to contain. One such element was finished today. It’s a ruined pyramid from my contact section. I’m really proud of it because its one of the few geometric objects I’ve drawn completely by hand (I usually some get help from 3D software and then build on it). I’m posting it here because it’s probably going to be a relatively small object in the final composition, but here I’m showing it in all its full sized, detailed glory.

Click for the giant sized version.

The inspiration for this structure is our recent trip to Mexico - the basis being the Temple of the Magician in Uxmal.

This requires Flash Player 8 or higher.

On a couple of occasions, especially in movies containing a song, I’ve had to include some kind of follow along subtitles. I hear this is super easy in video editing software like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier. However, in Flash the answer is no so apparent. Here’s how I got a subtitle effect identical in look and quality to those on DVD and right in your SWF file.

I created the text in a good, thick, and readable font. For this lesson I’m using Myriad Pro Bold, I standard font included with OS X. Now the whole thing about subtitles is that they need to be readable no matter what’s behind them. They are usually made up of a light color surrounded by a black outline. My example will be simple black and white, but grey, yellow, powder blue, or pink are all common.

Plain text with no effect added yet.

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I have to absentee vote in my state’s primary because I’ll be in an undisclosed location on Super Tuesday. The problem is I need more time. I used to make fun of undecideds with all their wishy-washy self important angst. For god sakes pick someone! Well now I’m one of them. The Dems have three decent candidates for once and I can’t tell who to support in this whole three-way guy on girl on guy mess. My troubles mostly began at last night’s debate during which my two year old learned how to say “Obaba!!!”.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary is a pain in my butt. She’s a woman, and for that reason alone I was going to vote for her. It’s a historic moment. A barrier is about to be broken and it’s a doosie. A woman in office, no matter how ill suited, is an opening that can never close.

Plus Hillary never came off as a bad candidate anyway. When she was First Lady I never really disagreed with the woman, whether it was health care or taking a village to raise a kid. She certainly travelled more than any other First Lady and so probably has all the diplomatic experience she claims.

But, and as much as I hate say this, she is a bitch. Not a “Woman with an opinion” kind of bitch. I’m talking about a pull the rug from under you, “I wouldn’t accept this behavior from a man either” kind of bitch. Last night she was all over Obama with ridiculous charges of loving Bush’s economic plans and hating rape victims. It was total smear, and to his face even.

Not only that, but the Clintons are trigger happy mo-fos. The both of them. They may talk the diplomatic talk, but, damn, they like stuff to go boom. We bombed the shit out of someone somewhere for some reason every fucking year of Bill’s 8 years in office. Let’s not forget Hillary’s biggest fact fudge this campaign season. She said to Obama last night that his speech against the war in 2003 wasn’t enough. He later supposedly went on to say he supported Bush’s handling of Iraq. “Actions speak louder than words”, she said. Well, Hill babe, didn’t you vote for the damn war? And what action have you really taken since?

Barack Obama

Obama is a black man, and that should be enough to make me want to open another historical door. But to me Hillary’s door will be bigger. A different gender shakes the power structure harder than yet another man whipping his dick around the oval office as has been the casefor 250 years now.

Still, a brother in office, even if he is a recent import and not a decedent of slaves, is a big deal. And his lack of Washington experience is a plus in my mind. Hillary is an old Washington hound with a lot of connections and a lot of money being thrown her way. She’s establishment now and pretty much more of the same. Obama is different. The thing is I don’t really know what he stands for that’s different from Hillary in any real way. When you’re talking liberal politics I guess there is a lot of overlap, but this is a case where Hillary is kind of vague on her stances, and Obama is “me too” but even more opaque.

In the end my wife likes him best, and since my wife is not a citizen I often vote her way if I can’t decide.

John Edwards

Oh, here’s where the real pain starts. Edwards may say he’s a son of a mill worker 100 times a day, but everything else he says is clear, honest, and right up my alley. Johnny, more than the other two chuckle heads, states everything he plans on doing to the corporate power structure in detail with no fear of reprisal. No corporate lawyers in the White House, no dealing with companies that won’t play fair. Plus he has decades of experience in court that say he means it. While Obama and Clinton may have me scratching my head as to what they’re up to, Edwards lets me know what’s up and I like it.

Plus Edwards kissed my kid. Granted I had to pay $15 for the privilege, but still!

The problem with old Johnny Ed is that he’s another White Southerner with a dick in a long line of White Southerners drawling their way into office and dictating to rest of us who are none of the above. That may not sound good enough to oppose him, but on the issue of Gay Marriage Edwards claims he’s against it. He’s doesn’t know why, but he guesses it’s just a Southern culture thing. Well, slavery is a Southern culture thing too, and how do I know you’re going to stand up for any civil rights at all if you can only stand up for the popular ones publicly.

So there’s my dilemma. All of these guys have strengths and weaknesses. They all turn me off in some ways. They all make me pitch a tent in others. So who do I check on the ballot? It was so easy in 2004 when Howard Dean left early and everyone else was an idiot. The answer was simply the funniest: Al Sharpton.And don’t give me Kuchinich. He’s a total numb-skull with a lot of slogans but no actual policy.

Well, I just watched Bruce Timm’s latest DC animated brainchild - Superman: Doomsday. I love Mr. Timm. His simplistic, angular style made me realize my own drawings didn’t have to be bogged down with detail I didn’t enjoy putting into them. Timm also has always been one of the few artists, comic or otherwise, who could give women strength and power while keeping them feminine. He’ll always have my respect and admiration, but I have to say Superman: Doomsday is a disaster. An absolute disaster.

I was never really a huge comics fan even though I love the characters, so the fact that the movie diverges radically from the comic doesn’t concern me one bit. It’s better to rewrite something to fit in 90 minutes than to butcher it into an overly fast paced shell of its former self. What did bother me was that the plot that was written is just a rehash of Timm’s earlier DC themes. While Superman proper is pushing up the proverbial daisies, Lex Luthor is busy building a clone army of him from the blood he coughed up in his battle with Doomsday. The one Superman clone Lex has successfully finished turns on him and destroys the clone army in progress. He then has to battle it out with the real, newly resuscitated Superman. You see the clone is kinda evil in a well meaning but fatal way. This is the exact same plot Timm used in his Bizarro centered episode “Identity Crisis” in the original Superman Animated Series.

The plot being a rehash isn’t bad enough, though. All of the writing seems uninspired, especially from the minds that created hundreds of hours of animation that consistently put its live action and comic counterparts to shame. The reveal of Doomsday is quick and shoddy. He’s as mindlessly and boringly evil as he is in the original comic, but with nearly 20 years of hindsight not learned from. His rampage is overly gory to the point I had to look away from the screen. Superman seems extremely disinterested in human kind in his attempt to stop Doomsday. I sat calculating the death toll as Superman threw his nemesis through yet another residential building. Supes lacks any remorse or even second thought about all the carnage he’s personally causing, very unlike his usual self. Only a little girl making a ridiculous and rather trite appearance on the battlefield sparks Superman’s fear of collateral damage.

There are moments of brilliance here and there, though, in the area of character study that Timm used to excel at before he became more interested the large scale super battles of Justice League . Lois has a tearful conversation with Martha Kent about how the the world loved Superman but never knew his love the way she did. It’s touching even if it’s Anne Heche’s robot-like voice delivering it. After Lex Luthor beats the hell out of his Superman clone with Krypto-gloves he mounts the Man of Steel, looks down, and says “Who’s your daddy?” This makes Luthor and Superman’s antagonism something its never been before in mainstream media: sexual. Although, I wonder if the world needs another homoerotic cartoon villain (I’m looking at you, Skeletor, Cobra Commander, Star Scream, and Frieza).

The only thing more uninspired than the plot is the art direction. This is the worst looking Timm project ever. Everyone, from Luthor to Lois Lane, to Superman himself looks like they’ve got anorexia. Luthor is like a walking stick, Lois has a bulbous head and the body of Nicole Riche before she was inseminated, and Superman has more pronounced cheekbones than a cheekbone-o-saurus. Jim Olson has been made into more of a boy band member than his usual Archie Andrews self and he and Lois appear to be the same age visually despite Lois claiming she was flying helicopters when Jimmy was in diapers. On top of looking like a teenager, Lois is quite trashy, appearing with stringy, flat hair, and a skirt so high I should have been able to see her woman hood (and by “woman” I mean “clitoral”. A far cry from the professional looking Lois of the Animated Series.

ZOMFGWFT?!1 Eat a sandwich!

The drawings themselves are equally abysmal with every line on screen being exactly the same weight. It’s like someone chose the pencil tool in Illustrator, picked the 1pt stroke size and then had a spontaneous lobotomy while tracing the cells. Colors are also far more blunt and garish than what you’d find in most of Timm’s work. The animation is choppy at times and below what you’d think a budget bigger than TV would get you.

So, overall, this was a poor outing for Bruce Timm and his DC Animated Universe. It’s great that he bravely decided to rewrite a plot that was less than stellar in the fist place, but I don’t think he took a big enough chance and tread too far into ground he’s already visited. I also think in trying to set this story apart from his established DCAU he seriously lapsed in the character design. I’m hoping next year’s adaptation of New Frontier will be better.

This actually happened two weeks ago, but I was out of the country at the time. The 40 second animation I did for CodePink: Women for Peace was released for public consumption. Its the heart warming tale of three senators attempting to steal seized Kuwaiti gold bullion from the Iraqi bunkers… or not. Just watch it! Its only 40 seconds and its pretty good considering it went from glimmer in my eye to full production in only two weeks. The project was managed by Jody Evans and the voice over was done by Medea Bengamin, CodePink’s C&C.

You can see the original Flash version here.

I’m back, folks. The trip to Milan for the festival was wild. They put us up in a warehouse that was used for trading livestock before it was abandoned. It was set up dorm style with three in a room and music and dancing until 6am. My movie film played to about 100 people and was pretty well received. And then afterwards there were the interviews. I did three of them, but I only have two on tape so far. Hopefully the camera crew will get the last one to me as they promised, but for now enjoy the first two.

This one was done by the festival promoters in what was called the “Director’s Corner”. The fest was sponsored by Jamison’s Whiskey. You’ll see why that’s relevant in a moment. I grew to like Jamison’s because it gets you high fast. Really fast as you’ll also see in the video. The end of the clip features me wondering why a building full of 20-30 years olds drinking and dancing all night didn’t turn into a sex fest. If you’re angered that a married man would care about such things realize that there’s nothing in my vows that stops me from watching, and video taping, the sexual gratification of two to forty consenting adults. The guy up there with me is Andy Blubaugh who did a great documentary called “Scaredy Cat. It doesn’t have exploding heads in it, though.

This is an interview for an Italian TV station taken before my film was screened so they watched it on my laptop first. Good luck hearing me over the translator.

Apparently the whole world does hate us. Perennial über-violent, Bush bashing favorite The Flood has been accepted into the 12th annual Milano Film Festival. Believe me, folks, I’m as shocked as you are. The land of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini is embracing little old me as a artist type. There’s something so wrong with that. And yet so right.

So I’m flying out there from Istanbul as soon and the wife and my vacation in Turkey ends on the 14th of September. They’re paying for my lodgings and I’m assuming the rest of the trip can be written off as a business expense.

What I’m fearing most right now is that the Europeans, mildly justified in their dislike of all things red, white, and blue, will embrace me as a fellow America-hater because my movie film is so anti-Bush. That’s what most Euros in the States have assumed me to be. A lot of Americans seem to think that too. My wife, however, knows from our various arguments that I’m actually a rather boar-headed, flag waving patriot. It’s true I don’t like our corporativismo, health care, or shoot first nature, but other wise I have my proverbial wang hilt deep in American pie. Anyone who walks up to me with the assumption that I dislike my native land is going to get a really shocking earful, not only on why the US is great, but on why their country sucks.

Or at least classical Western Art. I’ve been a big believer in Europe’s central place in the cultural world for most of my life now. I lived and breathed the Renaissance and the Baroque in college. I’d have sucked Caravaggio’s dick if it had ever been offered to me. (and, judging from this painting, it would have). And don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate it. What would I have to jerk off to if it wasn’t for Renoir? I mean, who in this day and age takes pictures of sexy, underage, fat girls? No one!

But I’ve been growing disillusioned of it for awhile mostly because its so prevalent. From birth to grave we Americans told in no uncertain terms that we are the sole purveyors of culture and class in the world. Even my university steered me hard in Euro art history classes and its about all we talk about in other classes. Its such a shame too because unbeknownst to the average American while Europeans were wasting their time trying to copy life in the most literal way they could (even resorting to tracing lens produced projections) the people of South East Asia and Africa were creative abstraction geniuses. European art history has to cop to this because the foundation of Cubism is African art, but this is nothing more than a side note on the way to more Euro-centric greatness.

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I’m the father of a 14 month old, so I’m always on the look out for something original and interesting for her to play with. I just got a glimpse of this new stuffed doll from designer toy shop Friends With You while I was in San Francisco’s MoMA gift shop. It’s called a Smiling Malfi and it looks innocuous enough. It’s got a nice minimalist aesthetic that borrows from turn of the twentieth century cartoons. Cartoons of what though? Where have I seen that coal black skin, large, round, unfocused eyes, and cherry red, oval lips? Where, I say, where?

Holy crap! What were they thinking? How did this get passed an entire office of people all the way to the factory and into mass production? How did it get passed the distributors like the MoMA and Sparkability? How did the reviewer at Wired Magazine not notice? Are they all blind or am I just stupid? I mean, my wife and friend saw the similarity and all I had to do was point and say “What does this look like?”. So I don’t think Im completely out of my mind here. I’m not going to accuse Friends With You of consciously choosing the mascot of “Nigger Joe’s Tar Soap” as the basis for their toy, but some image similar to it must have gotten in their mind because the two are practically separated at birth.

In honor of my new release I’m starting a viewer contest! Hidden somewhere in “The Flood” is a picture of a very obvious ejaculating penis. It’s in one single frame out of about 3,000. I want one of you to find it and let me know. Just use the video below or the flash file to located that magic frame and then take a screen shot of it. Mail the screen shot or a link to it to: blog at mark2000 dot com. The fist person to send me the correct image will win the page from my sketch book seen below, which contains the prototype models for the two main Flood characters on the front and back. I’ll sign it and mail it to your door! And if you, your mom, or your sister is really hot I may even deliver it personally! Hurry up and find that dick!

My latest and greatest film, The Flood, has bee released. Its an idea I had over a year ago and finally realized after two months of hard work. Many thanks to Paul Miller for the intro music, and even more thanks to Mia O’Maya, the actress playing the reporter (who is based on Christiane Amanpour). So vote for it and spread it around!

The original Adobe Flash version can be found here.

The Reverend Jerry Falwell was found unconscious in his Lynchburg, VA office today. The room’s floor was covered in pornography depicting lesbians having intercourse with various farm animals and the walls were stained with copious amounts of whipped cream and sexual lubricants. The reverend was said to be sweating profusely when he was discovered. Later the same day he died at Lynchburg’s General Hospital.

An autopsy has found that a large amount of Viagra was in the Reverend’s bloodstream and a thin layer of fecal matter was covering Falwell’s penis. The fecal matter has been examined and determined to be that of an unidentified 12 year old boy. Due to its freshness, doctors believe Falwell’s sodomization of this boy may have been the cause of death.

When asked to comment on Falwell’s final moments of pedorasty, long time friend Newt Gingrich was angered that the 12 year old didn’t have the sense to fix up the office and wipe down Falwell’s penis after the Reverend passed out from raping him. Gingrich says the boys he rapes would never be so irresponsible.

Falwell, 73, single handedly turned the Christian Right into a political force because having two centuries of white, Christian men in nearly all public offices was just not enough. He is also known for commenting that the 911 attacks and Hurricane Katrina’s devistation were God’s punishment for women having jobs and gay people falling in love. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has ordered May 15th to be a city holiday in commemoration of Falwell’s death.

I’ve been working a lot lately between the CS3 versions of Flash and Illustrator and have stumbled on some eccentric behavior. First of all, Illustrator has two types of documents now - one for web and one for print. You decide on the welcome screen which you want. If you’re going to paste import to Flash always choose “Web”. If you choose “Print” your colors will not be accurate even if the document is in RGB mode. Strange but true. Even black will come into Flash as a dark grey. You won’t notice it until you start filling in colors and notice your lines are washed out looking.

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As seen in Lesson 01 we’ve drawn something. In Quick Tutorial 01 we saw the mechanical process by which we color in the something. In this lesson, which could be the most complex, philosophical, and important in the series (and only three lessons in!) we’ll see how to determine what colors you’ll use to fill in your drawings. This ain’t paint by numbers, kids. This is art. This lesson will save you $2000 in credits at a university and $30,000 at a technical art school (at which they probably don’t even have a true color theory course, so fuck ‘em). With this big a topic I’m sure I’m going to miss something important so please feel free to add to the comments.

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Sometimes one of you guys need help and you need it right now! If I have a lesson in the works that will help you I’ll try to push it up on the timeline to get you back on track. Lesson 02 was to be on color theory, but reader “Amazing Robie” has a movie that’s playing back extremely slow:

I created a pattern, made it into a symbol and used the symbol sprayer tool in Illustrator to make the top of the tree.

I’ve already tried generating it w/out the tree and it comes out better, but I would like to keep it the way they are if that’s at all possible. I was hoping there was a process I wasn’t aware of to make Flash better handle many vector objects at once. and keep in mind this is only the bare part of what I’m wanting to put into the movie. I still haven’t added sounds or characters or anything else.

This is the tree movie…

And here is the shirt pattern…

Please help if you can.

Ok, Robie, remember in Lesson 01 when I said you never need to optimize Flash anymore? Well, that was for drawings only. In a case where you’re flooding Flash with a huge amount of vector shapes (like hundreds of leaves on a tree) it just won’t be able to handle it. In fact, there’s no form of “vector” optimization that can help you. That’s probably why Flash doesn’t have a pattern brush or fill option. I know you want all that beautiful detail, but it just can’t happen with vectors. I have a solution for you, though: Bitmaps.

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Quick tutorials will be straight forward, step by steps that will lead you through a process. Unlike lessons that will try to teach something in depth, quick tutorials will just tell you what you need to know to get shit done.
In Lesson 01 we talked about doing the bulk of your drawing in Illustrator. For coloring the opposite holds true. Flash is far superior to illustrator for adding color to a drawing because it has a fill tool not unlike a bitmap editing app. Just click an enclosed space and, viola, its full of the good stuff. In Illustrator if you want the same functionality you can use the Live Paint Bucket, but it doesn’t work on shapes made by brushstrokes, open shapes, or on Tuesdays. It’s so complicated it gives you instructions every time you use it. Avoid.

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It’s always a toss up when Flash is updated to the next version, especially for the non-programming artist. Flash 5 and MX were huge leaps and must haves. Flash MX 2004 was a major let down with more bugs than features (one of the few Flash versions in history to need patches). In fact, necessary features were actual removed (object level undo, normal actionscript mode)! Flash 8 Pro’s major features were the ones removed from MX 2004 (the two mentioned earlier) and a few photoshop style blend modes I haven’t used much - mostly because they require a player many haven’t upgraded to yet. Now CS3 has been released, and guess what? Again, there’s not much to talk about, especially for the artist. We’ve been waiting nearly two years for a change of logo from Macromedia to Adobe and a mild UI update.

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Here is part one in what hopefully will be a long running series of lessons for cartoon animators working in Flash. Its not so much a series of tutorials as a series of tips on how to add extra punch and refinement to your work. A lot of this stuff will seem like a no brainers to a seasoned pro, but for those starting out I think these lessons will be invaluable. And perhaps there will be something a few pros can use too. I’m going to assume you have the basic equipment: A computer, a scanner, a copy of Flash 6 or higher, and a pressure sensitive graphics tablet (preferably a Wacom).

If you’re a cartoonist you draw a lot of lines. In fact, the majority of the time lines are the most important part of your work because they define, not just the shape and personality of your characters, but the mood of your entire animation. It’s important that your lines look good.

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