THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I had a crazy last day of work last week.  I spent the entire work day plus extra hours working on The Couch Gag I was assigned.  Everyone had forgotten that Good Friday was going to be a holiday and I didn’t have the designs for the Couch Gag until Holy Thursday morning, about an hour before lunch.  I started working on the Gag before I had the designs, hoping I would have them by the time I needed to clean up the characters.  I had the rare opportunity of animating a lot of the Gag.  In the end, I didn’t get to fully animate it, but I got all the keys and timing down the way it ought to be.

The Gag didn’t have a standard family run in. It had a slightly different version of the characters and I had to  redo the run in. I ran it past the director and he gave me his notes on what he wanted.  I redid the run in again, and he approved.  At that point, it was already two o’clock. The problem was that the run in was only the first half of the Gag, the second half had an animated pull out and some action after that pull out.  This gave me only two hours to finish something I really should have had at least two days to do.

It’s one of those mixed blessing. On the one hand, I got to do some fun animation. On the other hand, they gave me no time to do it, which kinda killed the fun a bit.

I got done by ten o’clock.  I timed it and even made a mini movie out of it.  I was very very tired at that point, but also very happy with how the Gag had turned out.

The irony came when I was about to turn the Gag in.  Usually when we’re done with an assignment, we just upload the work onto the server.  The problem was, that since I wasn’t officially working on the show after that day, I got logged off the server.  They didn’t know I was still working.  Everyone was gone by that point and I had no way of letting anyone know I had a problem.  So I couldn’t turn in the Couch Gag.

I decided to go home and left a few messages informing production what had occurred.  Monday, I was informed that they had retrieved the work and everything was fine.

What a way for me to end the season.

MY WEB COMIC

Below is the rough for the page above. Not much else to say really, except that I didn’t use a red pencil under drawing on this one. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask:

VIDEOS

Yet another great animated  short from the Animation Workshop. Not exactly a topic I would picked for an spoof on superheroes, but I enjoyed it anyway:

WRITING

I decided to watch a few movies to see how the Magick was handled visually in them.  I looked at, LORD OF THE RINGS, HELLBOY,  and the DOCTOR STRANGE animated movie.  I didn’t really like any of their solutions, BUT I did get an idea from the HELLBOY movie. It actually came from a line at the beginning where the narrator says something about how the Nazi’s where using technology and magic.

This got me thinking. I told my wife about the line and she pitched me the idea that the Sorcerers can be wearing machines that take out their blood so that they could do magick. THAT was the key I was looking for.  That would make it both practical and visual. The Sorcerers use machines to do magick.  GREAT! Now, the question was, what will the magick be? Could I still use the fireballs?  I kinda don’t want to, because it’s a bit generic, so the hard part now is to come up with interesting attacks for them to pull off.  At least I have unique  visuals now. Perhaps I’ll have them do some sort of incantation and gestures when they do it too. That would help.

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