I am SO sorry for the late update! I’ve been really busy with the recent events and holidays… Black Friday included! Here’s an overdue update on how the film and animation related things are going.
First, a report on the Cineviews Film Festival! Their special guest was fellow Lynchburg, VA area (Amherst County too!) native Tuck Tucker, supervising storyboard artist on SpongeBob Squarepants. It was a pretty nice setup for the opening night gala. The nicest restaurants in town were catering and one table even had “Crabby Patties” (sliders, haha).
When I met Tuck, I think I surprised him when I pulled out my old He-Man VHS tape for him to autograph. His presentation was very good. He talked about starting in Hollywood and the projects he's worked on and he talked about what it’s like to work at Nickelodeon and what the workflow is like… it was a nice night. I even met some nice folks from Charlottesville!
The next day was the storyboarding workshop. There was mostly kids there, but there were a few professionals there too. I met Patrick, an artist out in Evington and Caroline, who scores music for all multimedia! Tuck played the animatic for an episode of Spongebob that he directed and hit pause at certain parts. He then instructed the audience to storyboard what would happen next. He asked me to pitch one of mine to the class. Pretty cool. Patrick pitched and a few kids pitched too. It was fun and I learned a few things about storyboarding… including that they use sharpies to storyboard to force the artists to draw clearly and describe the action and not worry about making pretty drawings.
It was nice meeting you Tuck and thanks for the kinds words… and for autographing my little Spongebob standy! It has a place of honor on my desk.
The film selections at the festival were great... they were all animated! I got to see Mary and Max, a fantastically written stop motion film, The Secret of Kells which is an Annie nominee for Best Animated Film this year and I got to check out Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues on the big screen. I got to meet a lot of the Riverview Artspace folks (Tuck's mom is an artist there!)... Bravo guys and I can't wait for next year!
Speaking of storyboards and animatics, I have been editing the audio from the recording session and adding the voice and storyboards to create the final animatic for the film. Some of the audio needed some serious cutting and pasting but I’m pretty happy with how its sounding. I’m learning as I go through this process. At the film festival, Tuck talked about how the actors on Spongebob read their lines from the storyboards. WOW, I kinda wish my actors read from the storyboards on my film! My actors read from a script. Their delivery and their interpretation of what happens is different in some places from how its drawn in the storyboard. However, they open up opportunities for acting and laughs that weren’t there before, so it turned into a win… I’m just going to have to redraw some of the action. Next project though, my actors will have storyboards to read from instead of a script. I’m not done editing it together at the time of this writing, so I’m sure I’ll learn even more as I go along. Meanwhile, here is a small clip of the animatic with the kids voices. Please forgive the animation “blue pencil”… my revisions will be in sharpie, haha!
Finally, a very special thank you to @Hollywood_Tweet on Twitter. The Jamari Animated project has been invited to be one of their live Twitter events!
I was checking out the Twitter and I saw a tweet from them saying to join them in their live chat. I click on it and I’m sent to this awesome page where I hear and see an interactive chatroom. I can hear the folks from Hollywood Tweet talking, see a chat dialogue from people attending and media elements all around. I joined in and helped them test out some of the elements of their new toy. Hollywood Tweet will host a series of Twitter events where they showcase filmmakers and musicians. They have the ability to interview via web cam or microphone, they can play video clips and they can open websites on the audience’s computers, all in realtime. I think I’m the first animator they’re going to showcase… which is pretty cool! It's really humbling and I'm so honored to be picked for this. This is all thanks to my nephews! The nice folks at Hollywood Tweet saw my nephew's Halloween cartoon on GoAnimate.com and loved it! It was the beginning of a great Twitter friendship. Thanks again guys and I'll keep everyone informed. It's yet more motivation to get things rolling on this film so I have cool stuff to show and talk about!
Next blog post, the art for my Christmas card this year... if I can figure out what I want to do... this is what I did last year, King Moonracer and the Misfit toys.
See you next post!
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