After years of pecking away on this epic 22 minute pilot cartoon, only few have had the nerve to shell out hard earned moo-lah to buy a copy! Now here is Family Pants’ Hole in ‘Da Roof!…. FREE in easy to swallow parts!
And if you want real quality… so life like you can actually watch it on your TV! Then buy a copy here!
Here’s the next Family Pants cartoon! My Dad gets motion sickness being a passenger in cars and I’ve made fun of his strange breathing here. And the dialog is a word for word argument about the difference between “dizzy” and “nauseated”!
My next blog entry will be the exact break down of the process of making a Family Pants cartoon… particularly this one!
I’ve also posted this cartoon on MyToons.com. At first I really didn’t give these guys a chance. I thought they were just another video posting site, so I sent in my cartoons at a low resolution. But this cartoon, I made in HD format for really no reason other than experimenting what it would look like on MyToons. Unfortunately I can’t embed MyToons in WordPress, so I have a JPEG which links to MyToons. I’m really very impressed. And, coincidentally I’ve noticed I’ve gotten more hits on MyToons than YouTube. (YouTube however gave me more people actually emailing me to make more cartoons.) Depending on how it’ll affect my hit records, I’m probably going to re-export everything for MyToons and repost it in higher resolution. From now on MyToons is not just another video posting site…
Lamaze Daze image
Long ago, when people had 56K modems or worse, and most saw downloading and installing the FLASH plug-in to view cartoon’s online, I thought of making black and white silent cartoon GIFs. Think of an animated pantomime comic strip.
It was an interesting experiment and a tough one at that. I drew this in flash and simply exported it as a GIF, but found the file huge. So I took out some in betweens. Still too big. I took out more movement. Still too big.
Finally, staging had to be changed. Originally the girl entered from the right and walked in front of Frank to get his attention. The solution was for her to enter from the left, take two steps, then turn to excite him.
So much work for such little gain! In no time, everyone had broadband and the small animated GIF idea became as useful as the “iceman”!
In the midst of me starting another submission to the comic strip syndicates, I stopped and instead made another cartoon! I recorded my Mom saying her Blanche lines on Easter and recently finished the cartoon this Memorial Day weekend.
Unfortunately this cartoon doesn’t have Gruno or Jöhan, but there’s lots of man-chests and other surprises!
This cartoon was another “sans-outline” attempt to speed production. But the time I saved not noodling that thick outline, I spent on making the color as bright as I can.
Another change is that this time, the only available format of this cartoon is through Revver.com’s video. I also made the credits up front and a quick ending to be more Revver-Ad friendly. Hope you dig it.
Let’s see what happens… [click the image below]
An update to this post is that I saw what happened…
After about 9 months on Revver.com, all my cartoons made a total of about $7! I guess it’s like the lottery. It IS possible to make money and people do it everyday, but it’s unlikely.
I do have to say the Revver interface is easier to upload and the resulting video looks better but unfortunately most people never use Revver over YouTube. So much so that WordPress won’t let me embed my Revver videos here. I’ve usually embedded a JPEG that links to the Revver site as seen with the above link. But a YouTube video can be embedded directly into my blog as seen below:
So I’m making the switch after this little experiment.
This cartoon is also a change of design pace. I bought Amid Amidi’s “Cartoon Modern” this Christmas and after drooling over the simplified characters I took a stab at making Family Pants a retro 1950’s look.
Again, as with the other “sans-outline” look, it sped the process a bit. Simplifying the color choices kept me from spending lots of time choosing colors. But simplifying the design is what made this process just as long as the more conventional thick outlined approach.
I’m not sure if it was the design or the gag, but this cartoon got the most attention. Although most friends and comments I’ve gotten say the outlined designs are better.
After making a few shorts I thought, “what next?” Was I to make shorts forever? What can you do with dozens of shorts anyway? So I presented the idea to my friend, Jason Sawtelle. We came up with a crazy idea to syndicate short cartoons on-line to the budding “web-a-zines” popping up. They’d buy these shorts much like newspapers buy comic strips!
Since “syndicating on-line cartoon shorts” sounded lame, we tried to brand the whole thing as a “JiffyToon”. I went to work turning 10 comic strips I had in my sketchbooks into 10 short cartoons. This way they’d be sold as a package… a continuing series. I also made a short cartoon explaining the licensing idea.
But the idea fizzled out, having people interested in it, but not willing to pay for it! I put the 10 cartoons together with a fade out to black and a fade in like the old Road Runner cartoons or Tex Avery cartoons that used the same device to string together a series of gags.
This cartoon appeared in the New York Independent Film Festival in 2003. People in the audience laughed, but I can’t guarantee they were laughing at the cartoon! For me though, it was an interesting experiment to see Family Pants projected up onto the big screen. The cartoons were made 100% in Flash, exported to Quick Time then saved to a camcorder’s digital tape. From the camcorder, it was run through an expensive digital projector that the festival provided. It looked unbelievable!
Also, somehow seeing the future for Family Pants was video, I changed the format to more conventional 1.33:1 proportions.
After reading a book about Ubbe Iwerks, “The Hand Behind the Mouse” I was inspired by his Herculean effort of making so much animation by himself in such a short period of time. I thought other than his bionic ability, drawing shapes more than forms certainly helped, since the early Mickey Mouse was a figure of black silhouetted circles. So I tried to eliminate the thick black outlines of the Family Pants characters to speed my one-man production.
In theory it worked. I normally would go through rough line work, clean line work, then coloring. With a “sans outline” look I go from rough line work to finish, coloring and cleaning in one step. In practice however, the color design slowed me down. Two colors could be close in value, but a thick outline will separate the two shapes. With no outline, the colors need to be different enough to stand out. So ultimately all the time I saved with losing a step, I gained with adding more time to the color planning.
Another different step I took here is that it’s the first time I have more than one shot for the whole cartoon. I cut to a close up of Frank. It disguises his having to walk over to the refrigerator. He just magically appears there when we cut back.
I also added the first appearence of Alexandrea voiced by my wife. She got laughs just walking into the scene!
This cartoon appeared in the Annecy Film Festival in 2002.
This one is one of my favorites, even if I’m the only guy to say so! Although it never happened, it just sounds exactly like something my parents would do. Plus it’s a classic joke… why did Frank cross the road?
I’ve wrestled with the idea of giving Frank and Blanche younger kids. This was an experiment with that. To make it all logical, I called it a “Family Pants Flashback” to when Nicholas was young. I sketched around giving Blanche a 70’s beehive hair-do and long pork-chop sideburns to Frank, but felt if I continued in this direction permanently, then I’d have to change their designs back.
Originally, this was about a tricycle, but Jason Sawtelle saw my rough boards and suggested making the toy a scooter. Perhaps it’d make the idea more modern. But more importantly, it’d be easier to stage Frank. With a tricycle he’ll have to walk around the toy, sit down and pedal off. While a scooter he could already be standing on and simply shove off in the end. A simple change in the story like this saved me days of animation, without sacrificing the gag. Animation is fun, but let’s be serious… it’s more fun when you actually get to finish the cartoon!
This Family Pants cartoon is where I found Frank’s voice- sort of a cross between Jimmy Durante, Mickey (from “Rocky”) and just a deep gruff added to the mix. It’s one of the most popular shorts, appearing on FandomFilms.com, IWantMyFlashTV.com, and appeared in WAC, World Animation Celebration in August 7-12, 2001. There it won 2nd place for, (take a deep breath…) “Best First Work Produced by an Independent Animator Intended for the Web”!
Jöhan, the dog speaks German, fitting for a German Sheppard. “Vas los?” I believe to mean “what’s this?” (Don’t mind my spelling please.) Jöhan never spoke after this, but what the heck, it was an experiment!
