A Visit to Tiny Toons Two-Tone Town

Tiny Toon Adventures was a very interesting experience. The memories that I have from it are all good. As a matter of fact, working on that show was a whole lot of fun. There was a carefree quality for me working on these cartoons and I remember laughing a lot. Maybe that's why in 'Fields Of Honey' I explode in a burst of laughter (more on that in another post). I had just joined the studio from Don Bluth's Burbank facility. I was working as an animation trainee and making a very low salary. Don't get me wrong; I learned many things there at the Bluth House, but it got to the point where I couldn't afford to work there anymore. Ken Boyer, who was one of the designers of the Tiny Toon Characters and a director for the show, offered me over double what I made at Bluth to join Warners as a layout artist! I loved animating for Don but I couldn't turn down the offer. Joining Warner Bros. Animation was a fantastic opportunity! Here I was working side by side with legends of animation and some of the most talented animation artists in the animation business! Working on Ken's crew offered me the ability to grow as an artist. Because we both liked the same styles of animation and design, it gave me the opportunity to stretch in the direction that I really wanted. In a short time, I was promoted to storyboarding. Storyboarding is as close to Directing a cartoon as you can get. Here you can really influence how the thing plays from beginning to end and that was very appealing to me.
Although I storyboarded a handful of Tiny Toon cartoons before this, Twotone Town was different for a few reasons. Even though it features the Tiny Toon characters, it feels like a different show. It was a half hour episode (most half hours were made up of three cartoon segments) and it is one of the few that features storyboard credits on the title cards (the episode was broken up into four blocks for the storyboard artists).
It's also one of the best animated episodes of that series...the twotone characters look great in the finale.
It's also credited as the inspiration for the next series that Warners would tackle called Animaniacs.
Although I was never credited for character models for the studio, I did influence a few through the boards. Near the end of this episode in Part Two, the Buddy Hackett caricature is from the only model sheet that I ever did at the studio.
(For your information, I worked on the last section to the finale!)

Pen Thumbnail sketches #1

Someone emailed me the other day about my drawings and somehow they got the impression that I never do dirt ruff sketches. After looking at some of my posts over the last couple of years I can see how you might get that impression. Truth is, I will do a lot of exploration with thumbnails to help me get where I'm going. If I can't get with what I'm after with a certain pencil, I'll switch off to some other pencil, marker or even a plain ol bic ball point pen, which is what you see here. Some of these sketches were done looser than normal for me and took no longer than 30 seconds to make. Because you're not investing a ton of time into the sketch, it's easy to discard and move on to the next. Like most people, there are times that I'll hit a brick wall. In those moments, it's best to walk away for a couple of minutes and clear your head. Get some reference, live action video, photos or look at other drawings that are similar. Go back to the board and use the reference to help you get the result you need. Worst case scenario, get another artists opinion and see if they can help solve the problem. Sometimes the solution is very simple and you were complicating it.

It's not a bad idea to look at the drawings you had previously done before becoming frustrated. Sometimes there's a gem in there and you glossed over it because you were caught up in the heat of the moment. BTW, the drawing on the bottom, is also a thumbnail drawn in a bic pen, but sketched a little slower.

Bear Heads.....

Here's some random doodles of a bear character I had rolling around in my head. Lately, when I draw I prefer to use Polychromos because it's an erasable pencil and it has a nice flow. Years back when I was working on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures For Bakshi & John K. and Beany & Cecil for John Kricfalusi, I was used to drawing in Col-erase, however John quickly got me out of that and told me to draw with Prismacolors for my character layouts. Prismacolor Pencils have a nice flow and you can get a drawing down pretty loose and quick, but the main problem is that they're nearly impossible to erase with! In order to correct the drawing, you had to use white out. I got used to drawing with those pencils and still like to sketch with them as seen here with the bear heads. My approach with Prismacolor is simple; I'll do a very light underdrawing first, then go over it with bolder strokes.
Most of the time though, I'm using Polychromos or Ebony pencils for my sketching, but will still switch back to Prismacolor for fun or col-erase for animation work.

The trouble with pitching shows...

Here's another character of a rat recording details from a crazy crime scene. It was from a project I was actively developing about six years ago that borrowed heavily from shows about detectives from the 50's and 60's. The pencil media is Polychromos Blue.
Now don't get me wrong, there's some great execs who take pitches all day long that get the ideas you're trying to sell...but unfortunately, there are a good number who have a hard time comprehending a good idea...or any idea.
It dawned on me after some rather unsuccessful pitches that a show like this could never fly today. It had a couple of strikes against it from the get go which I'll share with you here.
Strike One - It references a different time period. Because this show evokes old imagery from the 50's and 60's, Executives feel the show would never connect with todays' viewers.
Strike Two - The main character is an adult rat wearing clothes.
This would never fly with some executives because there would be too many confusing questions about the humanoid rat. I.E., Why is a rat wearing clothes? Rats can write? Is the rat really a human that looks like a rat? Why is the rat a detective? Can the rat talk? etc. etc. The questions would be too numerous to answer in a single sitting.
Besides, the rat is an adult and could never relate to children.
Strike Three - The rat character doesn't sing or have a band.  The kiss of death for a show like this. You see no band, no show.
Strike Four - The cartoon is a bit clever.  If the show has an ounce of wit or parody, the kiddies will never get it.
Strike Five - The cartoon has slapstick humor. You can't have characters hitting each other over the heads because kids watching will get the wrong idea and repeat it on their friends. Can you imagine the violence that could erupt nationwide?
Strike Six - The drawings are too slick and professional looking. If the drawing is drafted well, overseas animation studios will never be able to copy it. Better to stick to childlike drawings that are simpler to draw and kids can relate to better.
In other words, strive for the lower possible denominator. It's no wonder why kids don't watch cartoons anymore!

Bear and another bear drawing....

I decided to go through some animation related stuff today and came up with some drawings that I did for a video project that was being planned about ten years ago. All that I had left were some of these clean ups so I decided to post them here rather than let them collect dust in the old archive.

Media on these two were simple sanford light blue for the roughs, then rubbed down with a gum eraser and cleaned up with a standard number two pencil; like the ones they used to use in schools. The Sanford colerase pencils can be purchased at any Michaels art and craft store.
I used to use blackwings until they stopped making them...now I hear they're back, but I'm so used to using regular number 2 pencils to clean up my work, I hardly step into an art store anymore....unless I absolutely have to....

Discarded Portfolio Drawings: ...With the fishes...

Just so that you know, I'm doing my best to publish one post everyday (at worst one post every two days). I apologize for abandoning the blog for so long over the last couple of years, but I had a whole lot of personal issues that forced me to put it on the back burner. I'm committed to keeping the blog fresh, interesting and up to date, so please stay tooned. If there is anything you'd like to see more of, let me know.
Todays' post is of some fish, which I pulled from my portfolio about five years ago. However, for some reason I didn't discard them (and I throw out quite a few older sketches!) probably because I liked something about the design. Actually I still do! Years back I was a dedicated Bluth fan, I studied some of the animation of the fish from 'Xanadu' and 'Banjo The Woodpile Cat' and those influences made their way into these drawings.
Drawn with an Ebony pencil on regular bond paper, these sketches have no construction lines. These sketches were drawn clean, locking down the shapes and then adding the eyes, fins, mouths, etc.

The Spooktacular New Adventures Of Casper

When I moved back to NY in early 1995, I had secured freelance work on a show with a new production outfit in Manhattan. It all sounded good in the beginning. Everyone was impressed with my work and credentials and couldn't wait for me to get going on the first storyboards. Then everything came crashing down. Nothing went right. Changes were ordered on almost every single panel; from just about everyone in the studio including assistants. I have no problem with revisions, but some of the changes were absolutely moronic. After a valiant attempt to please everyone, there was a second round of revisions on top of the revisions!
That storyboard which should have taken 3-4 weeks to complete was now taking 8+weeks to complete.
I stopped work on the show and told the production manager I was done. Although I was happy to be off that show, the sudden realization hit me; I had no work and virtually no prospects of future work. I called around to a bunch of studios and there was no work to be had. It was a scary moment. I began to doubt my decision to move back to NY, but miraculously, I soon found myself being offered series work from a good number of studios. First came a series offer from Hanna/Barbera, then another from Universal Cartoon studios and then there were other various freelance jobs. I grabbed all of them; I didn't turn anything down! The longest lasting of these jobs was offered by Alfred Gimeno who was Producer and Director of the new Casper show at Universal. I ended up storyboarding a whole bunch of episodes from 1995 through 1999. When I was young, one of my favorite cartoons was Casper The Friendly Ghost, so I thought it was a real kick to work on the new show!
To say that working on Casper was a breeze would be an understatement. It was a fun show to work on, with lots of opportunities to do a whole lot of funny business. The ghostly trio, with their obnoxious personalities were my favorites; lots of great character business! The problems that I had with the previous studio were practically non-existent on this show. All I remember from the experience was laughing a whole lot at some of the drawings I created. Of course there were changes; a few here and there, but basically what I boarded remained pretty much the same in the finished version on the small screen. The first few boards were really rough in nature and I was asked to draw cleaner. I can rattle off drawings pretty quickly and by slowing down a little bit I can actually get a good amount of info into the drawing. The boards presented here are actually still considered rough storyboards, drawn in Ebony Pencil that look clean. What I did was rough out each panel with a quick gesture of the action, then rubbed that down with a gum eraser and drew over it with a sharpened ebony pencil. That's probably why you don't see a whole lot of construction lines in the board pages posted here from 'Pen and Tell Her' (click on the images then click again to enlarge the pages). This enabled me to save time in clean ups later. One board that I did in this way went through without a single change! Alfred would later leave the show and a new director, Marija Maletic Dail took over. Pretty much it was business as usual although Marija had a few suggestions here and there with her take on the boarding.
Looking back at these drawings, it's definitely not my best work (hard to believe it's been 15 years since I drew them) but it's still better than the drawings done for the finished cartoon!There were lots of shortcuts taken (as the boards had to be done fairly fast) and some of the drawing seems a bit off. However, I think it captured the attitudes pretty well and it's cool to look at. We had a whole bunch of people working on this show from the Animaniacs and Tiny Toons crew including writers, voice people and animation artists. Overall, it was a pretty neat experience but looking at the end product left me a little non plussed. The cartoony expressions and attitudes were basically discarded by the overseas animation studio (obviously not knowing what to do with them!).
As I recall, there was a whole lot of frustration with the production being on a such tight budget.
The finished animation was extremely uneven at times, sometimes downright horrible, but that's what you get sometimes with overseas animation houses!

Ruff sketch...

Here's a little quick sketch that I did of a pontificating fellow.

It was done in with an ebony pencil with plain copy paper.

Never underestimate the power of copy paper for pencil drawings...it's a great drawing surface for a couple of dollars per ream!

If you've noticed, I haven't posted a whole lot of cleaned up drawings in the past. The reason is simple; there's a power to the ruff sketch that comes right out of the imagination onto a clean sheet of paper. There's going to be a bunch of imperfections, but the power of the lines and the raw attitude of the pose makes it much more interesting to me than a labored over clean up. Besides, I can rough out a pose like this in a minute or two whereas a clean up will take me much much longer to lock down.

Bottomline, I'm able to post quick sketches much more frequently.

To this day, I learn a whole lot from rough drawings. It's almost like you can see how the artist approached the sketch. There's something about a really great ruff sketch that gets me totally enthused. The vitality of the drawing really takes over and makes the thing alive!

Now don't get me wrong...a really well done finished drawing can also be terrific...with the emphasis on 'can be'. But the truth is, some clean ups are merely adequate, and lose all the flavor of the original rough drawing because the rough is traced.

A direct tracing with a clean sheet of paper over the original almost always loses something in the process. Unless you have a master artist doing the clean ups!

When a great clean up artist is at work, he or she enhances the original rough by redrawing it, trying to plus the original.

I've worked with a few clean up artists over the years and some of them should have been animating because they were just that good. But they preferred working in the trenches because they did their jobs well and didn't have to worry about producing 7 feet of quality animation in a week. Thank god that we had these people content in their jobs because they made the character animators look sensational!

Anyway, getting back to the rough drawing above, a friend commented to me that this drawing wasn't all that rough. His point was that most of the detail was there and locked down in single lines.

Well, I've done ruffs that resemble lollipops with scribbles for legs and I've done drawings that have many of the elements close to locked down. But even with a drawing that appears to be close to done, there's still things that I would like to add or change before I finalize it.

OH by the way, I did this drawing today...not in 01 as I mistakenly scribbled on the bottom.

YAKKO'S WORLD

After finishing work on Tiny Toon Adventures, the staff at Warner Bros. went to work developing Animaniacs. A few months into development when we were locking down the stars of the show, I went ahead to animate some Walk cycles for Yakko, Wakko and Dot, which were received by the producers in a great way. Immediately after development, we went right into production minus our layout crew. We were told to draw our storyboards tighter in order to use them as layouts for the animators overseas.
Eliminating layout might have saved the producers some money in the short run, but it put tremendous pressures on the storyboard crew.
Yakko's World wasn't the first cartoon to be storyboarded (for me that was The Big Candy Store) but it was the most labor intensive.

When I was presented with the script, it was just the lyrics for the song matched to the Mexican Hat Dance. Since I sometimes take things too literal, I thought that it might be a magical kind of idea to have Yakko doing the Mexican Hat Dance, while pulling hats out of thin air representing the countries that he mentions in the song. So to get the full picture, hats would be appearing, disappearing, swallowing up Yakko and finally for the finale', exploding as he reaches the final verse of the cartoon. I thought it was a great idea because it felt like a throw back to some of that great animation from The Three Caballeros, Dumbo and some of those amazing WB Clampett cartoons.
I was really excited at the opportunity to do something absolutely surreal for network TV. So, the first thing that had to be done was the research. I looked in book stores and in libraries for all the different hats worn around the world. I researched customs, clothing, dances..anything that would aid me in boarding the cartoon. Then I set down to work, roughing out my Yakko's World masterpiece. I spent the better part of two weeks roughing out the short cartoon. Unfortunately, most of the research ate into my boarding time. I was late with the storyboard and although the production execs cut me some slack for a few extra days, patience was wearing thin. Finally, I stayed up late one night and finished the thing. I was sure that all would be forgiven once they saw what I came up with.
The next morning, my director and I were asked to present the storyboard to the producer. Armed with my masterpiece we proceeded upstairs to The Producer's office where we sat down and started to pitch Yakko's World. I flipped over the title page, showed my boss how Yakko leaps into frame and starts in with the hats when he stopped me.
"What th' #&%^@# is this?
Just have him point to the countries on a map!"
I looked at my Director and then back to the producer and then quietly exited the office with my masterwork in hand.
The only thing salvaged from the original board was...the title page and.....
page one where Yakko leaps in. The rest found a home as a giant wee wee pad for my dog.

I was given another two weeks to RE-board Yakko's World with him pointing to a map.
Again, I had to get some research (mainly a map) to accurately represent the countries that Yakko points to. Unfortunately, that was just the beginning on the headaches of working on this thing. First off, some of these countries are so small that they don't really register on the screen and second off, the writer of the songs' new lyrics had problems rhyming certain nations together. So in using creative license, he used so called nations like 'San Juan' to rhyme with Guam. San Juan was easy for me to figure out as a city in Puerto Rico but others were not as easy, and I have to say that I probably lost some hair due to the stress that Yakko's World put me through.
The third problem was that the song moves pretty fast and there's not a whole lot of business that you can do between the short breaks. That was important to me because I thought the whole thing of pointing to countries was pretty boring.
To help perk things up a bit, I had the countries light up as Yakko points to them, which you really had to do because many of these countries wouldn't be seen because of their size...plus remember that Yakko is pointing to these places at lightning speed.
Another thing I incorporated was a little dance that Groucho Marx once did for (I believe) the movie Animal Crackers. One of our staff guys (I apologize for not remembering his name) animated this little dance with Yakko that was inspired by Groucho's dance in Crackers. Since it was a development type thing that wasn't being used in production, I thought some of it might fit within the breaks and liven up the thing, so I called for it.
The other thing that I did was to have Yakko roll up in the map at the end, instead of the explosion of hats that I had in the original version. It just seemed like a good way to finish it up.
I expected a good number of changes when it went for approval, but none were requested and it went into animation without a hitch. A few months later, I was called into editorial to see the finished version. Everybody, (myself included) was quite pleased with it.
I recall being surprised that it was very entertaining.
Warner's Executive Brass thought that it was so good that the cartoon was run in The Warner Stores and on The Fox Network as a teaser, months before the show hit the airwaves.
Pretty much the way I boarded it is the way you see it on the screen.
So here it is...Yakko's World.

New Website Address

Finally, after years of people telling me that my old website on AOL was a real piece of crap, I finally registered for my own domain name and will be posting new webpages there over the next couple of weeks. Currently it's under construction. Thanks to Kevin O Neil for pushing me over the finish line.
New site is $#@!#$%@.com, so keep it on your favorites list.

UPDATE!!!! AUGUST 17th, 2011

Actually with this blogger account, there is no need for a separate website anymore.

And BTW,

that other site hasn't existed for a couple of years now....