October 2002 Archives

I was home at lunch time today as I wasn't feeling the best. I got a chance to watch Spiderman and also the accompanying DVD's. I was interested in the DVD with Stan Lee where Kevin Smith is interviewing him. One very irritating and uttterly annoying thing Kevin Smith does is a nervous "Aaahugh" all the time Stan Lee is talking. Just nod your frigging head you gumboot !

There was the question of who created Spiderman. Steve Dotke or Stan Lee. I disagree that Dotke is the creator. It was Stan, Dotke was an afterthought.

Well, there was plenty of spiritual fluid running freely amongst the crowd on Saturday night. I've only just begun my recovery process. I wasn't too well on the Sunday, a stomach bug that I couldn't shake from the previous weekend decided to rear its ugly head again in a moment of desperate need of normality. The bug and alcohol proved to be a problem and I couldn't sit upright for the 3 hour trip home in the car. Just the thought of anything pressing against my stomach would send it into a spasm that would make any normal person shake and tremble in fear. I fought bravely.

Apart from all that, there were a multitude of rumours going around. Only few I recall. Can't repeat them here as it would lead to many near fatal breakdowns of lives. Amazing what alcohol does to a person though.

Made drawing any strips on Monday night a real bastard. Got through it though. Just.

Heading out to Canberra in a couple of hours for the weekend. Should arrive around 11pm if all well. Up early in the morning for the ACA Annual General Meeting and then the National Cartooning conference. Then into Saturday nite with the awards. Looking forward to it all and catching up with friends. Hopefully will remember to take digital camera and some snapshots for the site. Anyone interested can find more details about the ACA at www.abwac.org.au.

Busy week again. Haven't had much time to scratch various parts worthy of scratching. I've been a little more busy than usual this week in preparation for the national cartooning conference and awards in Canberra. Should be fun to catch up with colleagues and embibe in a few grape juices. There were a few issues that needed more attention recently which delayed me getting some artwork in for a fundraiser and awareness exhibition for the Canberra Zoo. Caretoons was put together by Valerie Parv, Queen of Romance writing. I finally did get a piece done but far too late. Here it is anyway :

It's a funny thing the entertainment industry. I've been keeping to myself for a while to try and clear my mind of the clutter that builds in your mind over time. There are moments when you need to take time out to reflect and re-assess where you are going in your cartooning path. Sometimes you lose focus and take your position and situation for granted. Time to myself is one of the best things I can give to myself.

I found a great journal of a sound engineer recently. I feel comfortable knowing there are others that suffer with stupidity of others in the workplace.

I’ll eat pretty much anything that casts a shadow these days. As I proved at a friends place last night. Good news though, there is finally a new Wallace and Gromit

One of my favourite comics at the moment is Opposite Forces . You should immediately go out and buy a copy of it right now.

Back to the drawing board you bastard. Here is a recent super hero from my loving of a drop of red.

While I'm busy getting my head around the new MacOSX.2 here is a link for you to check out, very nice work indeed. Voices in my Hand.

Working away on a book I have been writing the past few days. I thought it would be a great exercise for me to be able to write and draw a book on techniques or tips that I would have loved to have known when I was fumbling my way through testing my drawing skills at a young age. Funny thing is though, even though I have come a long way in my career I still get those symptoms if white paper syndrome. Kicking back and reading a few cartoon books or how-to-books is the best thing to do sometimes.

The most cool thing I have been doing for this book is converting all the illustrations to a vector format. What I hope to do is use them later for other possible ways of delivering tutorials through multimedia. I finally worked out how to get the best reproductions during the scanning and converting to Vector routine.

Very busy of late, didn't get a break to post yesterday. I just had a message from a friend that made me end up on a website I played with for a bit. I found two old friends/colleagues I hadn't heard from in a while. I met Nancy Beiman years ago when she came to Australia for one of our Stanley Awards (National Cartoon Awards) nights up in Coffs Harbour. I had been busy myself when up there as I had been organising the National Cartooning Conference for that year and there were all sorts if issues to cope with. I think the conference went down well. Nancy and I didn't get to chat about too much as I had more planning to do that day for the awards night. She did however give me an autograph, I had at the time the Art of Hercules at the conference and Nancy opened it to the page with her work on the three Fates and proceeded to sign her name and add a few little details to the page. I caught up with her in Sydney after the awards night when we flew back. Nancy was kind enough to shout me dinner that night (lucky because I had just come straight from the airport and had lost my cards and wallet) and we spent a few good hours discussing animation and Bollywood.

The other lost name was Lili Chin. She is now a CoDirector for her own animation studio called Fwak! Animation. I first met Lili when I was in art school. She used to be our life model at the time for a while. Even on her bad days, like when she had been out rollerblading and came off the bad way big time and had a huge bruise, she was still a great model to work with. Good to see she made it in to the animation industry.

Just about finished the details for the new animated short I have been working on. There are a few little bits to knock before it can be called done. I've also been trying to remember how to do preloaders in Flash. I stopped using Flash for web animation a while back and I can tell you now, you forget everything you know very quickly. And changing versions of software doesn't help either. Flash MX is such a pain in the arse when it comes to interfaces. It's not that it isn't good but they moved stuff around so much I'm all lost.

Anyway for a sneak preview check it out - Short animated film.

Fresh back from the long weekend and the first thing I am told of is my mothers house in Engadine is a few streets away from an out of control fire. The suburb has been blocked off by police which will cause major road jams of which mum will be stuck in. I still have quite a lot of stuff down there unfortunately too which I am yet to retrieve. Still getting over the last major fires I went through living in Jannali in 1994. Lucky to get through that one.

More reports on Local fires in NSW here.

Thankfully we have a 3 day long weekend starting now! I need a little time to myself. Although I will be probably working if not being organised to go somewhere.

As a freelancer I (we all) have to spread our skills out to ensure we survive and ride out the storms of economic turmoil. One area I have focussed on has been with developing my website. It gives me a chance to practice what I have learnt over the many years. I first started when I built my site back in 1995. A cheap looking bit if crap in comparison to what is achievable now. When websites became far more popular in 1997 there were a ridiculous amount of people wanting to charge upward of $2000 for building a static HTML site of 6 pages. That was why I decided to teach myself how to program for the web. I can't believe that people would charge you loads of money for something that was done by a learner using a WYSIWYG editor they bought for a couple of hundred bucks.

These days I am teaching myself MySQL and have a good handle of PHP behind me. I use many PERL scripts across the site and in the near future the site will see even more deployment of my self motivated new skills. It isn't the easiest thing to program for the web but then again cartooning ain't so easy as it seems either. For those interested the main site is entirely run through PHP and uses module templates. The cactus cartoon archive is a PHP script. The feedback form, recommend me and email newsletter were all PERL.

My life wasn't nearly complicated enough until I learnt PERL.

Well the judging was done in just under two hours. The winners can be found at the National Schools Cartooning Competition website. There were a couple of hundred entries to scan through and the primary school entries were absolutely amazing. I'm surprised that the better cartoons, gag wise, were from primary schools and not the secondary. Not that there weren't any great ones there but the level of humor is vastly different and certainly is outstanding in the competitions finalists. There were the usual political cartoons submitted. In the primary entries there was one entry labelled Bin Laden as a 3 yr old with a picture of a small child in robes throwing a paper aeroplane at two tall piles of lego stacked on the opposite sides of the room. Now I didn't know how to take it at first but then you could read it in many different ways. Was the child trying to convey to us that this person has had ill intentions since a young age? Were they referring to his bad upbringing? I came to the conclusion that this was one of the best cartoons I had seen. It made a political comment and as I stood there watching the reaction from other judges, it appeared that it hit the sore spot at first but made them think twice. And that is the impact an editorial cartoonist should have. We encountered the same issue with Princess Di's death. The hardest part is that we are so far away from these issues and with our battler instict we are from a society that can only show our pain through humour. Unfortunately it is the case that our colleagues abroad do not share or understand the way in which we prefer to deal with our losses. It's a hard thing to describe as I type but in general what I think I am trying to say is that we share the same feelings as those who have been mourning but deal with it in our own way.

Nonetheless there are more cartoons to see at the website if you are keen to see the work of these students. National Schools Cartooning Competition .

I've been invited as a VIP judge to the National Schools Cartooning Competition. The judging is being held tonight at the State Library of NSW in its Glass House. I remember judging at last years and there were a number of entrants that obviously had redrawn cartoons that they had seen before. It helps narrowing down the copiers and then seeing the real creatives left. There were only 6 from memory last year that caught my attention out of a large number (more than 80 posted on the walls as finalists). With any luck the gags will be a little better. I judged years ago when Princess Di was killed and there were a million cartoons from all over the nation with really bad Mercedes jokes in them. I'll be keen to see what comes up with this new lot.

So I have been filtering through my files and attempting a spring clean of the office. Crap everywhere. It just seems to accumulate so bloody fast. Funny thing is that everytime I throw things out there seems to be a crowd gathering around my recycling bin pilfering what they seem to be vaulable pieces. Glad they don't know what I keep for myself.

Found an original rough animation sketch from Chuck Jones in amongs the debris. Some storyboards from An American Tale, Bluth is not too bad at drawing.

On a more recently asked questionable not... recommended animation books. Whatever you do, never buy the Richard Williams book called the Animators Survival Kit. Absolute crap which is no surprise coming from someone who lacks in personality and talent. Bastard even pinched half the content from a more well known book I would recommend highly. Anyone interested in animation should buy the Animation books by Preston Blair. Far more useful and incisive.

Back to the cleaning. .... . .. .