God Bless Americana  Field Trips - Awesome. Charles Phoenix also does cool slide show performances. (Thanks, Peter for sending this link!)

Half-Baked Doughboy!
and other relics

We’re finding lots of old project ideas as we clean the studio, filter through and clear out the files on our computers. We had forgotten that half this stuff even existed! For example – (click on images to enlarge) -

© 1999 Eddie Mort & Lili Chin

Half-Baked Doughboy Gets Laid (1999) - I think the text and pictures speak for themselves. Eddie wrote the story, I sculpted the Half-Baked Doughboy and designed the Lady. There’s also a storyboard somewhere … Not sure where it’s gone… and a DAT tape recording of the Lady’s dialogue (performed by my friend Goretti).

SYNOPSIS

Half-Baked Doughboy Gets Laid is a rites of passage story. In a seedy motel room, our half-baked hero ‘entertains’ a larger than life lady, who bites off more than she bargained for, but ends up liking what she chews. The visuals and storyline revolve around the passive pastry boy, and his reactions to the striptease and seduction he is being subjected to.

TECHNIQUE

Half-Baked Doughboy Gets Laid will be a combination of 2D and 3D stop-motion animation. The character of Half-Baked Doughboy will be modeled in clay. The animation will be filmed digitally before being imported into Adobe Photoshop, where it will be digitally coloured and enhanced.

Doughboy’s lady will be animated via traditional 2D methods. The roughness and construction lines of the original animation drawings will be allowed to remain in the final animation for a fresh natural look that accentuates the character’s physical attributes.

Backgrounds will be 2D, with sketchy, yet very detailed watercolour feel that will convey the ‘seedy motel’ as part of the production.All dialogue will be in Spanish with English subtitles.

The accompanying music will be a sultry mix of Bossa Nova rhythms.

Sketches by Lili (1999)

Half-Baked Doughboy Gets Laid was going to be our very first indie stop-motion experimental project but nothing eventuated beyond the storyboards stage.The Doughboy figure is still sitting in a cardboard box at the back of our studio fridge…

Eddie: I forgot it was in the fridge! Maybe we should retitle it “Half Baked Doughboy Gets Mould”.

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Twisted Telly (2000) was our first Flash “job”. We were both working at Fudge Puppy Productions at the time. Between Eddie and myself (who designed and animated the whole thing) and Andrew Maunsell (who hand-painted the bgs) we produced a bunch of these Flash promos for Nickelodeon Australia’s ‘Twisted Telly’ block.

‘Octoboy’

All art © Nickleodeon

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Day of the Dead Musicians (1998) I animated this scene for fun when working at Fudge Puppy as a Clean-Up Artist. It was never finished and unfortunately, I don’t have the source animation anymore. All that remains is this one image…

©1998 Lili Chin

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Bubble Queen (1994) was produced by Eddie after-hours, when he was working as a layout artist/designer at RKA. Eddie tells me he animated, hand-painted and shot every single cel of Bubble Queen himself. …thank goodness computers came along! These are scanned cels -

Bubble Queen and her boyfriend

 
Bubble Queen’s mouseplay
All art ©1995 Eddie Mort

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Geek Love character sketches (1996?) Geek Love is one of my favourite books and I think at the time I had just seen Rooty Toot Toot (one of my favourite animated films). It’s such a demented bittersweet tale about a family of sideshow freaks. I read somewhere that Tim Burton has acquired the movie rights… it will be interesting.

All art ©1996 Lili Chin

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Two other short cartoons by Eddie, which unfortunately he no longer has the source animation for, are: Big Daddy Roth (1995) and El Domingo Sangrante (1995). We only managed to find a couple of line drawings and cels.

Big Daddy Roth (animation drawing)

These are scanned cels from El Domingo Sangrante

Eddie: It’s a spider who’s into women’s underwear.
And some sardines in condoms.

©1995 Eddie Mort

ML Flash Animators

Photos from abroad! Here are the Korean and Indian ML Flash animation crews wearing their crew t-shirts. (ML Flash production is divided between Bardel, Dong Yang and Jadoo)

The Dong Yang crew

The Jadoo crew

Now, where’s the Bardel photo?

Oz-Animation issues

One reason why the Australian Film and TV industry is in turmoil -  The US-Australia Free Trade Agreement Issue . Here is a more recent article.

“US interests will now determine what we can see on our screens into the future. The US studios are renowned for applying political pressure on governments throughout the world when governments try to promote local culture along side the dominant American product.”

While the folks over at Animation Nation Forums (USA) complain about the outsourcing of Flash animation to overseas studios, here in Australia we often get asked:

“So why isn’t Mucha Lucha produced in Australia?”

It’s a similar question, really. People want to know: Since the concept was birthed in Australia, since the creators are from Australia, shouldn’t the work be done in Australia? Why is it produced in the States?

Of course, most people in Australia have not been aware that ML was never a US-Australian co-production. WB Animation owns the property 100%. Kids WB Network has final say over creative matters. Legally, it is not our show and the powers that be had decided from the moment that the show was greenlighted, to keep the preproduction in-house at Sherman Oaks.

Things have not been so fortunate for our Australian industry. In the past decade, all 2D animation work had been outsourced to Asia and Flash had never really taken off here. (with the exception of Quads - a Canadian-Australian series which was animated in Perth). Funding opportunities for long format animation are scarce.

And now this Free-trade treaty which some say, threatens to do away with the need for Australian original content.

SPAA has organized a meeting in Surry Hills to discuss “the need for an Animation Division within SPAA ­ to look after the needs of producers of long-form series and other animation formats.” (quote Tim) …amongst other industry-related issues.

We are not sure how the Free Trade Agreement affects us exactly, as Fwak! has never relied on Australian government policies and funding for our TV work. We would be interested to know how we can support our local industry without limiting our output to whatever constitutes “Australian content”. (and we don’t mean we want to churn out generic American product either)  Can this work?

Links

From the latest Mu-Mesons (Sydney) newsletter:

“The Naked City” radio show- every Thursday between midday and one o’clock on FBI (94.5) with Jay Katz, Miss Death and Coffin Ed and guests that have included JJ (from Good Times), Roger Rogerson (from Bad Times),Solomon Burke, Jack Sargeant, Keith Mansfield (KPM Stock Music Legend), Neil Hamburger and many more. An adrenalin charged look at the sad arsed city of Sydney!

From Lisa@Cartoon Network.com: The Megas XLR website! A hotrod cartoon by George Krstic which premieres in the USA very soon.

We regret that this month we will miss these events in L.A.:

• Ray Harryhausen! (April 23rd)
• ASIFA’s UPA Screenings (April 24th)
• WB Animation/Cartoon Network Pre-School Seminar (April 28th).
• Christa’s “Hoodtown” book lauch (May 1st)

Anyhow, it’s good to be back in Sydney and catching up with friends we haven’t seen in ages. We have our resident visas taken care of now & tomorrow we’re off to Melbourne for three days. Next week, time for some serious work.

Hung Out To Dry  -Village Voice article

Walking Illusions! (link via presurfer)

Britain for Americans.

Every Friday 6.30pm on Cartoon Network Australia (and in Asia) is something called Toon-O-Scope, where they focus on a cartoon character, a bit like ‘Star of the Week’, we presume. These next couple of  weeks the spotlight is on RRRR-Rikochet! 

We’ve just learnt that he’s a bull-ish Taurean (like me).

Attack of the Giant Red Octopus (Pin Pin le lapin) is another amazing piece of work by Studio Tanuki,  the French animation team behind Catfish Hotel. It’s fascinating to see Europeans doing Japanese style animation in a time when most mainstream American cartoons are leaning towards an ‘anime’ look and feel.. We like that wacky French-Japanese hybrid sensibility…

Windows soundtrack

Preston Blair gifs! (linked from Cartoon Brew.)

There’s a great interview with Bill Plympton (also linked from Cartoon Brew ) where he says:

“I have three rules about how to make a successful (short) film that you’d want to get in THE ANIMATION SHOW. And the three rules are: one, make it short. Not above five minutes. Simply because it’s harder to sell a film that’s ten minutes or fifteen minutes. It’s harder to program; film festivals find it hard to program and television stations find it hard to program. Two, make it cheap. Now, with the advent of the computer and flash and other programs, it’s a lot easier to keep the budget very low on your film. When you shoot it on film, you use big cameras and all of that stuff. Three, make it funny. If you make a funny film, everyone will want it. I don’t know why that is with animation, but most people, when they see animation, they want to laugh.”

You could also apply these rules to making a pitch pilot for a TV series. In the case of Rule #1, we think it’s not so much distribution-related as that most people (including network execs) have short attention spans.. Sometimes less is more. Also contrary to the above, we have found that most TV networks will not program anything under 11 minutes or in some cases half an hour…

Rule #2 makes total sense. But how do you justify this when you have to hire a team and pay people to work on your project? It would have to be a pretty awesome project if artists are willing to work for peanuts… Either that, or you have all the time in the world…

Like everyone else, we envy Mr Plympton and Don Hertzfeld for being “independently successful making their films without investors or government sponsorship or independent wealth.” and continue to be baffled by how they manage to do this and keep up the high spirits.

Rule #3 … Funny, wacky, zany, silly, action, mega…

Eddie: Maybe we need to break more rules.

© 1999 Peter Murphy – Panorama of Sydney Harbour

WOW. Check out these Quicktime images of Australia at Peter Murphy’s Virtual Scenes and  Panoramic VR Weblog (click on the ‘panorama’ links)

“Asked to define his style, Murphy calls his blog a social documentary and points to a number of continuing themes: ships and the Harbour, urban environment and cultural heritage issues, parades and protests and crowds, art exhibitions and performance art, sunrises and sunsets, street scenes.

While Murphy thought the blog would motivate him to make more panoramas, his main motivation was to promote the concept of panoramic VR photojournalism.” - vrmag

Our new AOTM playlist – Cute Invasion! (Lili: Compiled for inflight listening. One of these days we’ll transfer it to CD.)

Rebirth is a ‘techno micro composer’ program which combines the sounds of  the  303, 808 and 909 analog machines. (Eddie: I like having the actual shiny boxes on my table, not the virtual software version )

The Stylophone  was a “pocket electronic organ” promoted by the legendary Rolf Harris. We both remember Rolf well from our childhoods.

Lili: When I was a little girl back in Malaysia, my Dad used to force me to watch the Rolf Harris TV show  – “He’s a genius. See how fast he draws?” And thus I learnt that being a good artist meant being able to draw fast and loose in front of an audience and get it right the first time… (the pressure!!)

Eddie: Rolf Harris was huge in the UK. When I was a kid I tried to win a stylophone in a contest. You had to draw a caricature of Rolf Harris and send it in. Mine was pretty bad. I didn’t win.

Well, look here - there’s a Los Angeles Stylophonic Orchestra.

Some web design links: