CTN-X MARKED THE HOT SPOT!

I just spent the weekend at the sooper very first ever Creative Talent Network Expo here in Burbank, California and man, it rocked like a hurricane!

See, the folks at the Creative Talent Network looked around and saw that there was no annual event in the LA area dedicated to networking for the animation community. So why not make one?

Yeah... WHY NOT?!?


But usually these things are a wreck the first year or two (I'm talking to you, NYC COMICON). They're disorganized, you can't find anything, they get overcrowded, it's hot and sweaty and the floor is covered with rotting giant squid (or something like that).

NOT SO with CTN-X! They really had themselves put together and put on a great event that people are gonna be talking about for a loooong time.

Personally, I couldn't have had a better time. I wandered the floor catching up with friends who had tables to hawk their wares (Craig McCracken and Lauren Faust, Bill Presing and Ikumi Moriya Presing, Scott Morse)... I hung out with other attendees (Khaki Jones, Chris Hamilton, Wilson Swain)... I went to absolutely amazing and informative panels (Pixar Storytelling, Dreamworks Production design, Animators who've made the transition from 2-D to 3-D, Visual Structure in storytelling, an interview with Mike Mignola) and made sure to introduce myself to lots of artists I've admired or had the pleasure of discovering at the event.

And, of course, I asked lots of folks to draw in my sketchbook. So over the next coupla days I'll be posting them up and telling you about some of the great panels.
In the meantime, here are a couple drawings:

This one here is by the legendary Eric Goldberg?!


Pixar's Bill Presing and his wife Ikumi... both old school New Yorkers!


How's about brilliant character designer Ben Balistreri?!


And there was lots of stuff to see and do. There as a wonderful life drawing model doing costumed poses (a cowboy, a pirate, the Godfather), live drawing, sculpting and digital demos by assorted artists, raffles, and of course, parties!



So all and all-- congrats to the Creative Talent Network for a MASSIVE success. They worked hard on this event and it showed.

So what could they do to make it even better for next year? Well for one, they're gonna need a bigger space. The floor was generally easy to get around, but the conference rooms weren't big enough and a lot of people got shut out (BUT... and this was VERY smart of the organizers... they had all the panels transmitted to TV's in the lobby!).

What else? It would have been nice to have badges for the attendees so you could know who's who.

But that's about all I've got to complain about.

Well, that and the fact I wasn't made Sooper Triple Just Moved to LA Guest of Honor.

Oh well.

Keep it locked for more in the next buncha posts.

I BEEN COWAN THE DAYS...

...until Sir Elliot Cowan would make good on his cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-be-fired-out of-a-submarine-torpedo-tube-naked promise to bestow a real live original Boxhead and Roundhead drawling on me.

And after 37 years... it FINALLY came:


SOOPER TRIPLE GORILLA-SIZED YAY!

But you know what's even coooooooler?
(Besides being fired out of a submarine torpedo tube naked?)

When you find ANOTHER drawing on the back of an original piece of art!

Like this teeny one here:


I'm not quite sure what exactly it is, though. It kinda looks like a glowering little Russian stacking doll with a genie's lantern on its head.

No?

Then perhaps I have it upside down?


Now it looks like a burnt roasting turkey with the head of a Rebel Commando (you know, the dudes who went to take out the shield on Endor... duh.)

What?!

You don't think that's what it is either?

Well then YOU tell me what the heck it is, smartypants.

And THANKS, Elliot!

THAT NEW SKETCHBOOK SMELL

Wasn't it just late last August when I started a new sketchbook? I told you about it over HERE but it appears that book is done now!

As you saw in that old post, I had started doing loopy, continuous drawings that traveled from page to page throughout the book and i pretty much stuck with that theme:


It turned out to be a pretty fun way to do a sketchbook...


Because if you didn't know what to draw...

you just draw a dragon...


that goes on...


and on...


and on...


aaaaand oooooooon...


and...


...yawn...


and then you move on to... i dunno...


a deep sea diver with some kind of intestiney air hose?!


or some telephone poles...


or sometimes you just need someone to hold onto the cool Naruto TCG card you got in the latest issue of Shonen Jump.

It's funny... some sketchbooks take a couple months, and others drag on for almost a year or more! This one went pretty fast, mainly because I wanted to just keep drawing even if I didn't know what I wanted to draw.

Anyway... that sketchbook is, like, SO over now. And it's on to new things.

So here's the first page of the new one... which has GREY paper instead of white (ooooooh!):


The drawings can only get better from here!

DON'T FORGET CERRITOS

Heya fellow Californians!

Don't forget that I'm gonna be rockin' the Cerritos Public Library this Monday, November 16th at 7pm! I'll be readin' and signin' copies of 1000 TIMES NO, talkin' about making cartoons, and drawin' pitchers! Come on down and say,

"Hi, Mr. Warburton! It's great to see you in the Cerritos Public Library at 7pm on Monday, November 16th!"

Lunchin'... WITH ROBOTS!

After doing countless hours of research in libraries and on the internet, and paying off many, many street informants, i FINALLY found out where Bob Boyle goes to lunch every Friday to discuss taking over the world with his fellow evil robots!

It's at some pizza joint in Burbank, and after staking it out for a couple months, I finally did it! I risked my life by disguising myself as an evil robot and crashed their little picnic!

It must not have been a very good disguise, though. They didn't mention ANYTHING about taking over the world, enslaving humanity, or bringing back VCR's. And instead of drinking oil, they ate pizza and sandwiches. And root beer.

They were obviously onto me and decided to play it normal by talking about animation and books and stuff. Which was kind of nice. In fact, there was this one guy named James Burks (not his REAL robot name, obviously) who was a creative director on WOW! WOW! WUBBZY! has now his first graphic novel, called Gabby and Gator, coming out soonishly. He even drew me a picture of them:


A couple other suspicious characters in attendance were Kyle Neswald and Frank Rocco... both creative director designer types on Wubbzy and/or Kung Fu Panda, El Tigre, etc. They did these drawings... which upon further study might be attempting to further Bob Boyle's robot agenda.


Bob drew something, too. But it was so anti-human... so unbelievably pro-robot evil that I can't show it here! It was also his version of one of my projects that's sooper secret so there's that, too.


All in all, it was a very nice lunch, mainly because they were acting all human and nice for my benefit. I might have to show up again... not because I like them or anything. Just to make sure they're not up to complete and utter evil.

ASIFA HOLLYWOOD CORALINE SCREENING

Soooooo last week I got to see Pete Dockter talk about making Pixar's UP...

And last night I got to see Henry Selick talk about CORALINE!

Ya gotta love ASIFA HOLLYWOOD putting on free screenings with the directors there to talk about them! Best deal in town!

This was actually my first time seeing Coraline. I hadn't read the book, so I didn't know what to expect save for what I had seen in the trailers. And I liked it. Wasn't in love... but visually it was stunning. I spent a lot of time being stupamafyed at what they had accomplished with stop motion-- which isn't necessarily a good thing since it kinda took me out of the story a bunch of times. But still, the movie was quite an accomplishment. And after the credits roll there's a time lapse sequence of a really complicated scene before they digitally took out all the rigging and stuff-- massively cool.

Afterwards, Mr. Selick came out to be interviewed along with supervising sound designer Ron Eng. And since you probably weren't there (because if you were I would have said HI and bought you some Milk Duds) I thought I'd transcribe some of the juicy tidbits from the conversation. So here we go:


• Mr. Selick originally got the book from writer Neil Gaiman's agent ages before it got published... apparently he was having trouble getting a publisher to pick it up because it was thought to be too scary for children. This same problem occurred once they tried to find someone to make the movie. So they were already developing the film when the book eventually came out and became a best seller.

• When bigshot producer Bill Mechanic came onboard, he had a previous deal with a company that said he couldn't do any animated projects. So they originally went around town pretending Coraline would be a live-action film until the deal was up.

• Mr. Selick's development process includes a lot of 'scrapbooking and sketching'. For instance, the Other Mom's spy doll idea (which was not in the book) came from an old obituary Mr. Selick found with a picture of a girl with a doll that looked just liked her. He thought it was weird and fit the story so he cut it out and saved it.


• Ron Eng brought up that when you're designing sound for live action films, you spend most of your time trying to hide bad recording on the production track, but in animation you get to create a whole world from scratch.

• Also regarding sound, Mr. Selick said that they tried very hard "not to add too many spices to the stew" and keep it very simple and sparse, especially in the 'real' boring world.

• When asked about the advancements in stop motion since The Nightmare Before Christmas, he said that while animating on TNBC they were able to save TWO frames of animation. But on Coraline they could save entire scenes. Which was amazing, but it caused a lot of "navel gazing"-- where animators would constantly refer back to what they had shot instead of forging onward to get the scene done.

• Another big advancement was the use of 3-D printers that could carve actual heads from computer models. This allowed for even more intricate facial expressions.

• After trying out hundreds of musical ideas for the movie, they found that the soundtrack to the documentary Winged Migration worked amazingly well. It was both "dark and light" and represented "true childhood.... not syrupy sweet stuff". So they brought the composer Bruno Coulais on.

• My question to Mr. Selick was "What sequence, or sequences, almost killed you?" The answer was that before any sequences had a chance to kill him, trying to get financing had already done the deed. But once that was taken care of, the garden blossoming into Coraline's face was a killer as was the sequence when the Other Mother turned the room into a spider web. They had to fabricate a 20 foot steel spiral that could bounce and still allow the animators to reach in and do their thing.


• Another fun anecdote came from recording the famous English duo of French and Saunders as the two old actresses who live beneath Coraline. Mr. Selick had flown out to England to record them and after hours of recording knew that what he got was "good... but not great". So, after much internal deliberation, he suggested that they switch characters... which almost instantly made the characters roar to life.

• When asked about how much of the film "actually existed" and how much was CG, Mr. Selick guessed around the 90% mark. He seemed uncomfortable talking about when they used CG in the film... which I assume is a stop motion animators point of pride. CG can feel like 'cheating'.

• And lastly, I had forgotten to ask about a phrase that showed up after the credits:

For those in the the know: Jerk Wad

So I googled it and found out that it was in reference to Coraline throwing her shoes at Whyborn and calling him a jerk wad. If you dig around on the Coraline website and typed in 'jerk wad' you could win a pair of shoes.

Obviously there was more things said, and more lyrically described. But this is what you get for not being there. As I said before... ya gotta love ASIFA HOLLYWOOD for putting on this stuff!

But then again, you know I'm always down with ASIFA, be it East or West.

UP AT ASIFA HOLLYWOOD!

Last night the fine folks at ASIFA HOLLYWOOD hosted a free screening of Pixar's UP which included a sooper triple special bonus Q and A session with the film's director Pete Docter! It was a bit late notice... but I dropped everything and ran over to the famous Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood and grabbed myself a seat.

And while I LOVED the film the first time I saw it...
I loved it even MORE the second time!
Now, I could spend an obnoxious amount of time gushing over what I liked about it, but I'd rather spend my time recounting what Mr. Docter had to say. That's way more fun and informative. So here are some choice tidbits from his conversation with Cartoon Brew's own Jerry Beck:


Sorry... this was the best picture I could get with the lousy camera on my phone.

• The story was originally even farther 'out there' and was more of a "Muppety Ernie and Bert in some kind of cloud kingdom" story until they started paring it down to find the "emotional core" of the story-- which ended up being 'about how Carl feels like he screwed up by never taking his wife on an adventure to Paradise Falls, but eventually realizes that their relationship was the adventure all along".

• When asked why they set the adventure in South America, Mr. Doctor said that Carl and Ellie's original destination was a deserted island, but they thought that location had been 'done' to death. Eventually Ralph Eggleston showed them a documentary about the rocky South American jungle that made Mr. Docter feel like that particular landscape WAS Carl himself-- craggy, stuck in time, desolate, etc. "The setting became the character and vice versa".

• On the topic of the film's pitch perfect voice acting, he said they spent a LOT of time auditioning... and that most professional voice actors were a bit forced ("too much jazz hands"). So they opted towards non-professionals, like the kid who played Russell. But because he WASN'T a professional, they "paid the price" and had a really hard time getting him to where they needed him. In a lot of cases they resorted to a kind of "method acting-- where I would hold him upside down or crush his arms at his sides to get the sound of him struggling-- whatever the scene called for".

• Also, it was Mr. Docter's daughter who played the young Ellie at the beginning of the movie. They originally recorded her as scratch track but everyone loved her reads so much it stayed in. Ed Asner (the voice of Carl) claimed she was "the best thing in the damn movie".

This is a picture of Pete Docter from Comicon... not last night

* One audience member claimed that Ellie's heart wrenching death made UP "the BAMBI of out generation".

• Another asked how Mr. Docter knows when he's 'got' a story right. His answer was: "When the deadline is up and people stop giving notes".

• In regard to the use (or misuse) of 3-D in films, his rule was that it had to be "...a movie about Carl Fredrickson in 3-D and not a 3-D movie about Carl Fredrickson." Which means that if the 3-D effects were too in your face (or in his words "Too Booooga Booooga!") then you're taking people out of the story.


• One of the few sequences to remain virtually untouched from storyboard was when the house took off and flew through the city. It was pretty much shot for shot the way the board artist envisioned it. The opposite was true for the sequence when they first met Charles Muntz, which they couldn't quite get right for a long time.

• A great question that came up was about particular production problems which led to breakthroughs. MONSTERS, INC had serious issues with animating fur in CG. Violet's hair in THE INCREDIBLES gave the programmers fits. The water in NEMO. So were there any big issues, as well as breakthroughs, in UP? The answer? Caricature. The character proportions made things tricky (ex. Carl can't touch the top of his head from a standing position) and they wanted simplified wrinkles for the clothing to achieve a certain look (they studied a lot of Hank Ketcham for reference). Instead of trying to be a realistic as possible (like MOST CG productions try to do... to yucky effect) they wanted to make a stylized world which ended up requiring a lot of 'cheating' to make things work.

• There was a lot of talk about the use of color in storytelling as well, which is always fascinating (I went to a lecture in NYC with Ralph Eggleston and others about this and it never gets old). He brought up an example of the world being bright and vibrant when Ellie was around, but dim and monochromatic after she passed away, only to brighten again once Russell showed up.


Sigh...

Gotta love those Pixar guys.

I wish ya'll could have been there because there was lots more, and all of it was said way more eloquently than I've transcribed it.

Anyway, thanks for the night out, ASIFA HOLLYWOOD. Can't wait to see whatcha got next!