Check out my new holiday film, THE NAUGHTY LIST, which I made for the FOX/Aniboom Holiday Contest! Described as "the demented lovechild of Rankin and Bass after a five-day bender in Tijuana", THE NAUGHTY LIST is at this time the most-viewed stop motion short in a field dominated by Flash entries (and some CGI). Please show your support by watching the film, rating, and leaving comments! Every view counts!
I'm excited to report that Red Hatchet Films is deep in production on a new, stop motion animated project titled “Bokrug” based on the short story, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” by H.P. Lovecraft. It's been a dream of mine to get back to working with a Lovecraft tale ever since our 2006 production of "From Beyond" proved such a blast to do. My friend Craig Mullins over at UNFILMABLE.COM suggested "Doom..." and after reading it I knew it was perfect. "Doom..." tells the story of the decadent city of Sarnath, whose greatness is built on the destruction of an older, primitive race of beings who live in the stone city of Ib, where they worship an ancient, reptilian god called "Bokrug". On the night of the 1000th anniversary of Ib's destruction, strange forces signal that the beings of Ib are about to be avenged.... Here are a couple test shots of some of the puppets and sets. I'm hoping to have the film completed by spring of 2010. Much more to come!
I got an email from my friend Audrey Holland, director of "THE SNOW PRINCESS" which was filmed here at Red Hatchet Films last year, who informed that little Princess Gwyneira is heading to the Festival de Cannes to be a part of this year's Short Film Corner! This after getting accepted to the LA Shorts Fest, the San Luis Obispo Film Fest, and the Beverly Hills Film Festival, to name a few. There's also a new trailer for the film up online, which you can view below:
Audrey and I have already begun work on a second film, a wonderful, wicked fairy tale called "TICKET TO HELL" which I'll be writing about shortly. But hats off to Audrey for getting her film out there and accepted to CANNES!!
Back in 2007 I was given a chance to create a short called "SAN ANDREAS SNOWMAN" for the Sherman Oaks-based holiday comedy troupe, "SANTASIA"--a terrific and hysterically funny group of guys whose work I look forward to every Christmas. The guys liked "SAN ANDREAS..." so much they commissioned me to do another short for the 2008 show that was much more ambitious: a spoof on Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece, "Pulp Fiction" to be titled what else? "PULP CHRISTMAS"!!
In it, two elf hitmen named Jules and Vincent are seen heading to a violent showdown with a gang of naughty elves who've made off with Santa's bag. It was a great chance to pay tribute to both "Pulp Fiction" AND the Rankin/Bass animated holiday classics that I watched growing up.
In my original sketches for the main two characters, Jules and Vincent, I wanted to try and create Rankin/Bass versions of the two actors, Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, who played the roles in "Pulp Fiction", capturing their essences without making them too literal...
After sketching out the two leads, I went right to work making up the puppets...
The armatures for Jules and Vincent: Super Sculpey over aluminum wire armatures with latex-dipped hands and foam tape built-up legs and arms...
Supporting players getting there...
All of the puppet armatures in various stages of doneness:
The heads were all made of Super Sculpey with Magic Sculpt hair added on afterwards to get finer detail. All of the facial features (mouths, eyes, eyebrows) were stuck on with "Quake Hold" Museum Wax.
The finished puppets of the three elf characters who are going to get an unpleasant visit from a couple of elf hitmen. I watched all the old Rankin/Bass "Rudolph" segments on YouTube to try to capture the style but bring something original to the designs as well...
I took these three puppets to the recording session and they all had their pictures taken with the actors who would be voicing them:
James Elden as "Brett"...
Brandon Loeser as "Hermey"...
...and yours truly as "Flock of Penguins"...
Some stills from the actual film:
Jules...
Vincent...
Jules terrorizing Brett...
And here is the result! A lot of fun to build and animate, and another great collaboration with some of my favorite L.A. talent!
The best thing about this whole process was that the director of SANTASIA, Shaun Loeser, told me that I'm now a part of the group, and as far as he's concerned I'll be adding a new piece to the company's repertoire every year! THAT is the kind of Christmas present you can't put a price tag on!
Sooo much has gone down since the last post. In addition to concluding "Mythic Journeys" last September, I also completed the 8th and final installment of "Adventures with the Ambersons" for SuperDeluxe.com. Shortly thereafter, SuperDeluxe was gobbled up by Turner's other, more popular website, AdultSwim.com, and now NONE of the hard work we did is viewable online (for the time being). I did find a few cool behind the scenes pics recently and figured I'd upload them:
Here's a couple of shots of the "Buttkraken" emerging from the sea in Ambersons 5, "Pirates of Funkytown", and the final shot of the Buttkraken taking down the pirate ship. The ship was the inspiration for the whole episode. I was walking home from Ralph's and saw a guy carrying it out to the curb, just leaving it in the grass with some other doo-dads. "Are you getting rid of that?" I asked. "Yeah, help yourself," the guy said, and I did, thinking, "This is going to be so much fun to destroy on camera someday!". I got my wish. Here are a couple shots from Ambersons 4, "Little Clown of Bethlehem". This is the scene where Mr. Tinkles, the evil, re-animated chihuahua tries to cut Marshall in half with a scythe. I also found some pics of the Wes puppet coming together. Starting from the beaten-up remains of the all clay version of Wes from my original film, "Valley of Gwombi".
I traced the puppet onto paper to keep the proportions the same and made a wire armature. The armature had tie-downs for the feet which I never used, since I just ended up hot-gluing these guys to pieces of card stock and sliding them around. Over the wire armature was baked super-sculpey for the "bones" of the puppet. I painted the super-sculpey the colors of the clay that would make up the bulk of the body.
The finished puppet looked pretty good, I thought, and pretty close to the original clay figures, which is what SuperDeluxe wanted. Teeny Ambersons, used for long shots. These were simple wire armatures with super-sculpey heads and torsos, fully animatable (including Polly's teddy bear).. More to come!
ADVENTURES WITH THE AMBERSONS Episode 5, "Pirates of Funkytown" is now online at SuperDeluxe.com! Check it out!
In other news, the FINAL episode of AMBERSONS has just wrapped! Crazy to think to that TWO year-long projects--AMBERSONS and MYTHIC JOURNEYS--have both wrapped within a week of each other. There's more work coming up, so check back for more posts soon!
Yes, as unbelievable as it seems to write that, today saw the completion of the stop-motion portion of "Mythic Journeys" which it has been my pleasure to be a part of. It's been just over a year since Steve & Whitney Boe and I started the very early preproduction on this special project, and today, suddenly, it was all done. What started out as a 3 month production schedule turned into 9 months as the directors' visions for the project grew, and all of us on the technical side worked really hard to make it happen.
I'd like to give a personal shout out and huge THANK YOU to my friends Kelly Mazurowski, who got our software and cameras going, Cam Leeburg for helping me animate some really awesome shots, Dick Kaneshiro for bringing in his AMAZING motion control rig--an invention I am in awe of and can't wait to work with again! Also the awesome Todd Smith for being in on this from the beginning and being a fantastic technical director. Leo Gotlibowski, you mad Argentinian genius, I cannot wait to work with you again. Jeannette Baitty for recreating Wendy Froud's costumes so perfectly! Tennessee Reid Norton for his expert consultations on how to get rid of evil flickering, and downtown Sarah Brown for creating some beautiful backdrops for us. To the other talented animators: Tom Smith, Justin Rasch, Jason Gottlieb, Matt Manning, Pete Levin--who spent insane hours in the garage/animation studio. I've gotten to see all these folks work come together and let me tell you, it's really going to be something.
And of course, to the unstoppable team of Steven & Whitney Boe, who should be the model for every husband/wife production company. They do what they love every day-- make movies--with each other. I can't think of a better way to live.
In other news AMBERSONS 7 IS ALSO WRAPPED! We only have ONE more episode of the AMBERSONS left! Who will survive??? What lies in store for the intrepid time travelers? Tune in and see!
