THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Simpsons Quote:

GRAMPA: I say we call Matlock. He’ll find the culprit. It’s probably that evil Gavin MacLeod or George “Goober” Linsay.

BART: Grampa, Matlock’s not real.

GRAMPA: Neither are my teeth, but I can still eat corn on the cob, if someone cuts it off and smushes it into a fine paste. Now that’s good eatin”!

When I first started out on The Simpsons, I was a cocky 18 year old with a big ego and crumby drawing skills.

A bad combination.

It didn’t help that I was just passable enough as a draftsman to get hired on the show.  I strutted around as if I DESERVED to have gotten hired. If I could go back in time to talk to my old self, I’d smack myself upside the head.

The Second Simpsons Show I Worked On.

I literally owe my career to Director Jeff Lynch. To this day, I have no idea why put up with me.

If I had been a smarter kid, I’d of gotten his subtle hints that I really  stunk and I should really not be so cocky. But, unfortunately for me, and everyone else, I wasn’t.

The second episode of The Simpsons I “officially” worked on was: LISA VERSUS MALIBU STACY directed by Jeff.

I worked on about five scenes in each Act. Mostly crowd scenes. Jeff would find scenes that I couldn’t possibly mess up or that would take me a long time to do and I’d do those scenes.

I remember drawing this scene. It’s one of my first memories working on the show.

The first scenes I worked on in this particular episode were, in fact, the opening scenes with the old people and Matlock.

These were given to me because:

1. It was full of crowds and
2. it was all secondary characters

The reason he assigned me scenes with secondary characters was because the family is so tricky to get right, that it’s much more obvious when they’re off model. The secondary characters are a little more forgiving if you don’t get them just right.

It was prudent for him to give the stuck up rookie a scene full of secondary characters.  This is the only time Matlock appears on the show. No one can tell how badly off model I drew him since no one had even seen what he was SUPPOSE to look like.

Exiled to The Little Dark Room

In order not to give me anymore work than he needed to, when I turned a scene in to Jeff, he would take one look at it and give it right back,

“Shoot it,”

“Oh, okay.”

This would send me to a little dark room, the size of a closet, where a video machine attached to a camera was set up.  Here, I would sit in the dark, time out a scene, and then “shoot the scene”. In other words, put it on video, taking a picture of my drawings, one frame at a time. This was LONG before we had computers to do this in.

The Matlock scenes I remember spending the most time on were the one where you slowly see him coming up the steps with both canes, and the close up choking scene.

Choking Matlock

The choking scene in particular took me hours (or was it days?) to shoot.

I’d done the scene and turned it in, but Jeff had asked me to shoot it. So I did, and I showed it to him. It was stiff as a board and looked awful. So he sat down in that dark room and reworked the drawings. He sketched out new, better, but very rough drawings.

They had a LOT more energy and power than the ones I had made.

He then wrote some rough timing on the corner of the pages and asked me to expose the drawings accordingly.  So I did.

I showed him the scene again, but it wasn’t quite right. It was MUCH better but not quite right.  He added a few more drawings, took some out and changed the timing again.

I shot the scene again. I showed it to him and he adjusted the timing a little bit again. So I shot it again.

This happened for a while. I spent my day shooting the scene.

When he finally got what he wanted, I asked him if he wanted me to clean up his roughs,

“No, just touch them up a little bit. Erase some of the darker lines and rougher bits but keep most to the drawings as they are.”

“Okay.”

So I did as I was asked.  I believe that I still have one of the rough drawings that he took out of that scene. One of my many Jeff Lynch mementos.

The Lesson

I was a complete moron and a lousy artist and animator, BUT those days, doing what Jeff had asked me to do and working under Jeff that way, where the BEST learning moments of my career.

My current understanding of timing and animation, EVERYTHING that I  know now, has it’s foundation in those hour and hour of being in that dark little room. It was my own little cave of knowledge where the wise man taught the foolish young man what to do.

Yet I was so foolish, I was hardly aware it was happening.

Thanks Jeff. Lessons learned.

Get e-mails

In this week’s e-mail, I got a bit candid about my emotional reaction to watching LISA VS. MALIBU STACY, for the first time in YEARS.

If you missed out on this e-mail. Opt in below to join the fun.

WEBSITES – The Drawing Website is Officially Up

Finally! The Drawing Website is up!

Alright, so if you don’t know anything about this new site, it’s one that I’ve just put up in order to help people how to draw.

If you don’t know how to draw a straight line, or a good stick figure, I help you fix that problem.

If you’re just, down right embarrassed about how little you know about the whoLE process, I help you with that too.

I’ll teach you what pencils to buy, what paper to use, what you need.

I’ll hold your hand through out the whole process and answer any question you have as you learn.

If any of this sound good to you, click on the link below to start learning:

TAKE ME TO THE DRAWING WEBSITE

BOOKS – Free copy of The Tower’s Alchemist Kindle book

Just a quick plug/update on my wife Alesha’s book.

I’ve been pimping this book ALL week.

If you haven’t heard, for this week and this week only, THE TOWER’S ALCHEMIST is FREE to download for the Kindle.

That means, if want to get yourself a FREE copy, you’ve got today and tomorrow to get it. Otherwise, you’ll need to*GASP!* buy it.

But seriously, most everyone reading this post will have missed this deal. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still pick up the book even though it’s now $2.99 (which is less then a Starbucks coffee and even a COMIC BOOK!).

If you don’t own a Kindle device, that’s okay. Turns out, you don’t need one. Amazon is in the business of selling books not Kindles.

As I’ve been telling people all week, if you have an iOS device, download the Kindle app for FREE. Also available for Android, Windows 7 phones and blackberry phones, FREE. Or you can download the Kindle program on your Mac or PC, FREE or you can read the book on Kindle Cloud, for FREE.

CLICK HERE for info about this from  directly from Amazon.

In case you’re wondering, here’s what the book is about:

Wizard Vs. Nazi Warlock Vampires.

It’s a very different World War II. 

The Nazis have unleashed occult forces throughout Europe and the Allies are forced to recruit and employ wizards to counter their attacks. 

Among them is the battle weary spy, Isabella George, a Gray Tower dropout trained in Alchemy. Longing for retirement and a life of peace, she accepts one final job–extract a deadly warlock from Nazi occupied France and prevent him from unleashing an alchemical weapon that will devour the continent.

But France is crawling with the Cruenti, vampiric warlocks who feed off other wizards. When things don’t go according to plan, one Cruenti sets his deadly eyes on her.

Betrayal is everywhere. Even some of her closest allies cannot be fully trusted. Worse still, she finds, she can’t even trust herself. She becomes a woman torn between her charismatic spy lover who offers her what she desires most, and one of her closest confidants, whose soft seductive eyes hold deadly secrets about her past, and the Gray Tower itself.

Plans within plans. Plots versus counter plots. Heists gone wrong, sword-wielding Catholic priests, and the greatest manipulation of history that has ever been seen, is just a taste of what Isabella George is in for, in her final mission.

If this sounds cool to you, click the link below and pick up a copy. Also available in hard copy:

BUY THE TOWER’S ALCHEMIST

FAMILY – Dante Fractured his Arm

Thursday night I came home and only three of my four kids greeted me at the door.  I asked where my 4 year old son Dante was and my wife informed me he was in bed. Seems he had been misbehaving and was put to bed early.

I went to see him and discovered he was still awake. I went over and kissed him good night. As I was leaving he stopped me,

“Daddy, my arm hurts right here,” and pointed as his arm. This is typical. He’s always complaining about something so I went over caressed his arm quickly and said,

“There, now go to sleep,” and walked out of the room. I didn’t think anything of it.

The next day at work, Alesha calls me from the doctor’s office.  Baby Luke had an appointment that day.

“Dante has a fractured arm.”

“What?!”

“He was complaining about pain in his arm…”

“Yeah, I know, he did that last night.”

“Oh, he did? Well, he seemed really hurt because when he moved his arm around he would cry, so I told him we’d have the doctor take a look at it while we were there. The doctor checked him out and took x-rays. His arm is fractured.”

“HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?”

“I have NO idea. He told me he fell.”

“Maybe he through a big tantrum when you sent him to his room and hurt himself.”

“We’ll, he and Elizabeth were playing pretty rough yesterday, pulling each other’s arms. I told them to stop.”

“Yeah, I don’t know…I think he through a tantrum. You know how he is.”

Well, anyway we STILL don’t know how it happened but he had his arm in a sling for a few days before he got his cast.

He was sooo happy to walk around with that sling on his arm.

And now that he has a  cast, it’s like he’s proud of it or something.

Kids are crazy.

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