Family Pants’ The Holiday Hedging Horror

What I did Over Christmas Break… and then some:
Why I finished a new Family Pants Christmas cartoon of mayhem of course!  Unfortunately, I missed Christmas, New Years’ and even Three Kings Day to unveil it!  So better late than never, I present Family Pants’ The Holiday Hedging Horror!

The Back Story or Who Needs Outsourcing in This Economy?
The “Holiday Hedging Horror” was written back in ’08 when the price of gas jumped through the roof.  I myself ran out of gas to finish the cartoon.

Plus I’ve been busy with my political cartoon, “Angie” about smaller government:

and a single panel gag cartoon called “Oxymoron” about… well strippers, nipples and silliness hoping to be the world’s first Twit-Toonist and post these on Twitter:

Panel cartoons and comic strips provide something to show for it with less than 1-2 hours of work.  Plus I could “work” on it while going for a walk or Christmas shopping as ideas that pop into your head only need a moment or two to jot down.

But with animation, you need to be shackled to your desk for non-stop work.  I thought there has to be a way to make cartoons faster.  Many productions achieve this by outsourcing labor.  Or “insourcing” by taking advantage of cheap slave labor we call “interns”.  In our current economy, and for some time now, economics, or the bottom line, has driven our industry over innovation or smarter thinking and planning. But it was innovation which grew America into a world power, not cheap labor!

So one day after rising gasoline prices yet again, I became motivated to finish this gag.  After watching some Gerald McBoing Boing and a great cartoon from Cartoon Brew called “Depth Study” by Terry Toons, I thought a simpler Family Pants design would ease my work load.

I was also motivated by Mondo Media’s Dick Figures and Doodie.com.  Their sloppy and loose style lent itself to be animated quickly yet actually very well.  And it’s “new”!  (So many art directors claim the “50’s” style is lost on kids who don’t know what era we’re referencing.  So what if it’s lost?  If it’s funny and in budget, great!  And if people who do know art appreciate it, all the better.  Why “bad” art is “in” I’ll never know.  Perhaps non-artists who produce cartoons feel less inadequate if the style is not far from their own limited ability?)

The original cartoon from 2008 was 80% done before I abandoned it.  Here is as far as I’ve gotten before abandonment.

Here’s a still of the new style again.  Rather than worry about making the line smooth, I kept the line rough.  And like Terry Toon’s  Tom Terrific, I didn’t even opaque the character, letting his lines bleed through other lines.  The innovation being better design… (hopefully anyway…)

In addition to the simpler style, I completely re-story boarded the cartoon using cuts to work around action, still telling the story but without animating everything.  The innovation being better thinking and planning the cartoon.  Here are the rough boards I worked off of.  Compare this to the original which has no cutting around action.

 

With thumbnails in hand, I roughed in the cartoon directly into Flash using a new Wacom tablet called the Bamboo Fun.  Here are a few stills.

I added my dialog tracks to the Flash time-line which I recorded using a Mini Disk recorder.  I can’t be sure, but I believe I hear some static on the recording.  Perhaps it’s that the equipment is old?  Or did I mess up the recording somehow?

I edited the audio tracks in the Flash time-line and animated to them, following the roughs.  Then I exported a SWF and imported it into Premiere.  In Premiere I added sound effects.  I could have edited audio in Flash’s time-line just as easy. Premiere is pretty versatile, but not faster to move around in than Flash.  It is however far more technically superior.  Flash audio editing is good for web stuff, but Premiere can generate audio as professional as you can imagine.

Flash’s Pain in the Butt Export
Since Flash 4, Adobe hasn’t figured out how to render out true QuickTimes from Flash.  Flash spits out a SWF, then “screen records” it into a QuickTime.  If your machine has balls, it could come out right.  However, unless you have a NORAD diesel machine, your record could skip frames or have artifacting.

The work around is to export a PNG sequence, then open the sequence in QuickTime Pro to render out a true QuickTime.  Even for a 2 minute cartoon, this could take a while.  As I’m the client here, I’m not bound to make nit-picky “tweaks”.  Imagine a horde of client changes?  Phew!

Instead I imported the SWF into Premiere to render from.  Technically, 20 guys could email me each 60 second SWFs for me to assemble end to end and render out a full blown HD quality QuickTime.  I’ve successfully done this using QuickTime Pro 4 and Flash 4 for Family Pants’ “Hole in ‘Da Roof!”.  But today, I need a far more expensive program to do the same thing.

At least with Premiere, you can do some real sound editing.

All in told, I think the 2 minute cartoon would have taken 3-4 days if I worked 8 hours/day right through.  (In addition to a busy holiday and 2 comic strips, I’ve also been sick!   I know… excuses, excuses…)

 

My Mom’s Nativity Set vs. Han Solo:
My Mom’s Nativity set set always had jungle animals in it.  I guess as the years went by, she added more animals to the mix she acquired along the way.  Many of them were in different product branding styles and proportions, perhaps from old toys.  Quite a strange mix to an outsider.  Long before “The Lion King”, my Mom said it was all the earth’s animals bowing down to Baby Jesus.  So when I drew Blanche’s Nativity set, of course I added an elephant, 2 giraffes and a lion without thinking.  When I was done, my wife asked, “What are they doing there?  Jesus was born in a manger!”  And then it dawned on me how silly it was.  I had to keep it.

Also, I remember getting yelled at not to play with the figures as my Han Solo action figure ran past Joseph and the sheep near the tree.  Han was of course on some adventure climbing a giant Christmas tree with lights and garland.  Perhaps on some tropical Wookie forest planet… that celebrated Christmas for some reason.  But the one thing you could never mess with was the Baby Jesus.  “Be careful of my Baby Jesus!” Ma would yell from the kitchen upon hearing some jingly thrashing about the tree and what sounded like a faint humming of the “Imperial March”.  Of course in the Family Pants universe, Frank would always unwittingly mess with Blanche’s Baby Jesus!

 

And one last bit of anatomical perfection…

Hope you enjoy!  At least until next year…

What is Family Pants?

Family Pants is a comic strip turned animated cartoon about Frank Mueller and his family.  Part goofy sitcom like I Love Lucy , but instead of Lucy angling for fame with a sneak appearance in Ricky’s night club, it’s Frank’s insatiable appetite to be self-sufficient which gets him in awkward situations.

Self sufficiency may be a characteristic more akin to the drama of Survivorman than the humor of The Honeymooners Ralph and his “get rich quick” characteristics.  But the two are alike as ego and stubbornness drive fools to failure.

Self-sufficiency is a trait I’ve found in myself through much soul searching and studying my father.  The best explanation of Family Pants’ Frank Mueller is the “pig fat soap” story about my dad.  The following story is somewhat true, it’s details exaggerated for humor and define a trait of my dad, me and exaggerated in Frank Mueller.

One afternoon my mother comes home with a grocery bag of soap; Dial for your hands, a Lava bar for filth, make up remover, Dove for the girl Redl’s and Zest for the men of the house, a couple of shampoos with a couple of conditioners for the hair, two more soaps for the laundry and a couple more for the dishes.

Upon inspecting the lush booty on the table, I complained she missed yet another “soap”, Noxema for my less than spectacular adolescent complexion.  My Mom quietly says she’ll get it next time, citing if I never put the item on the list, it would never make it in the grocery bag.

Now here enters my Dad, spying the mountain of “soap” on the table, the double-digit grocery bill and a son complaining his mother’s efforts were weak and lamenting on how impossible surviving the week will be without that one particular item.

My Dad erupts how I’m an unappreciative kid and leading by example, he tells a story about how in his youth he made soap out of pig grease, or “crease” as he pronounced in his broken English.

You may say he doesn’t sound much different than any other father, cursing unappreciative offspring and the re-telling of his harder youth.  But some back story on my Dad.  He grew up in post WWII Germany.  So when he tells of having nothing, he meant nothing!  He and his family ate whatever they grew or caught and lived meagerly without plumbing, carpeting, electricity or shoes.

Intrigued on the mention of pig fat soap, I stopped my complaining and wanted to know more.  Of course I’m visualizing simply pouring bacon grease directly onto your skin for that oh so fresh feeling.  In reality soap can be made from animal fats, but the recipe requires some refining and laborious “cooking” procedures.

But before my Dad could explain my Mom counters harshly, “You didn’t make soap from pig fat… get outta’ here!”  My sister enters laughing and cementing the imagery in my head of bathing in bacon bits.

Now begins the challenge.  In part to satisfy a curious son, but mostly to silence a doubting wife and instigating daughter, my Dad attempts to create pig fat soap.

Cut to the chase, the doorknobs are covered with grease, a hundred of dollars pots and pans are ruined, the holiday roast and all the bacon is burned up and my Dad’s skin is aglow in a rash caused by strange pig soap.

Sounds like a Family Pants episode?  You bet.  And suddenly the characters focus.

At first glance of this story, you may think my Dad is cheap, not wanting to spring for real soap.  But one thing about my Dad is that if given the money, he’d spend it all on his kids.  Growing up poor, he is not a tight spender if he runs into funds.

Perhaps my Dad is old fashioned, not wanting to use new-fangeled soap over soap made the old fashioned way.   But growing up in poverty made my Dad enjoy and welcome new inventions and the conveniences they bring.  He’d never want to go back to the old days again, especially for his kids.

Speaking of inventions, perhaps my Dad is some sort of crazy mad scientist, “inventing” his own soap.  While he is mechanically inclined, he lacks the inventor’s drive to either become rich and famous or change the world sharing his vision.  He is not an inventor.

Well maybe the guy is just plain stupid.  Lots of funny characters are simply that.  Btu my Dad is far from ignorant.  His brilliance may not come from formal education, his genius comes from learning “on the job”, forging a successful and respectful life and career with nothing but his hands and heart.  Call it God’s scholarship.

So my Dad is not cheap or old-fashioned.  Nor is he a crazy inventor or just plain stupid.  The true message in the pig fat soap story is being self-sufficient or self reliant.  Even if he got the recipe right, I doubt he’d save any money or the environment making home made soap over Johnson & Johnson’s factory brand.  It’s not about money or saving the environment.  It’s about depending on oneself and having the courage to make your own luck.  There it is again, stubbornness and ego.

I find myself the same way, only instead of complaining about a person’s dependency on soap, I find myself risking life and limb installing antennas and dishes the size of swimming pools on my roof to free myself from the shackles of the cable company.  Oooo, how I loath the cable company.

And so Frank is a little of Lucy Mcgillicuddy, Ralph Kramden, a little of me and a little of my Dad.  Frank is a Survivor-Dad!

The Washington Post Responds!

Unfortunately the latest Family Pants’ batch of comic strips have been turned down again!  But each rejection has been kinder.  It almost seems I was rejected because of faulty timing rather than smelling up the in-box of some editor.

Mrs. Lago of the Washington Post Writer’s Syndicate even gave me a short critique to be less illustrative as tiny comics are unforgiving to detail.  I guess I got too carried away with the detail.

Two left to go, King Features and United Media!

Creator’s Syndicate Responds!

And another NO!  Half way there…
Of the three rejects so far, I like Creator’s rejection the best.

They even had nice hand written addressing on the envelope:

Universal Press Syndicate Responds!

Yet another NO! But they have a nicer looking form letter…

4 more to go!

Tribune Media Syndicate Responds!

Unfortunately with a no!

There are 6 newspaper syndicates out there and Tribune Media is one of them.  The others are:

1) King Features, the oldest of the bunch
2) United Media, most famous syndicating “Peanuts”
3) Universal Press, which syndicated “Calvin & Hobbes”
4) Washington Post Writers Group, currently syndicating Bloom County’s spin off, “Opus”
5) Creator’s Syndicate, who gained muscle when Johnny Hart signed on.

I’ve mailed comic strip submissions to all of these since the mid 80’s and loads more who no longer exist.   For anyone who wondered what a rejection letter from a comic strip syndicate  looks like, here’s Tribune Media’s response to a recent Family Pants submission:

I wish it was a positive response, but at least rejection letters from comic strip syndicates puts you in good company.  “Peanuts” was rejected by every syndicate save one, back when there were a bunch more syndicates out there.  Jim Davis of “Garfield” said he could paper a wall with his rejection letters, and “Superman” was rejected so many times, the creators decided to ditch newspapers altogether and publish as one of them new-fangled comic books.

I’ll post the other 5 responses when I get them.  (Hopefully some good news…!)

Strip Website Launched!

I finally finished the re-vamped Family Pants website. I hoped to finish it Jan. 1, but hey, April Fools Day is as good as any other day. (Actually, I can’t think of anything more fitting for Frank Mueller…)

It still has the same cartoon and animation links, which can be accessed through the “Everything Else” button, but now the focus of the site is on comic strips.

The site is just an empty SWF shell, which reads the date, then picks the correct strip to show. This way, I could just dump 50 strips into a folder and let the SWF update itself everyday. If you roll over the strip a menu pops up where you can select to see previous strips, start at the beginning of the story, or advance strips, but not past today’s date. For that, you gotta come back tomorrow! Eventually, when I get more stories finished, I’ll insert a button that can view the previous story in it’s entirety, so the site always has a complete story up there.

Details of my idea of what comic strips can be can be read in my previous posts, Plot Complexity vs Character Complexity, Comic Strips and Shrinkage, and Ensuing Complications in the Pants.

Hope you like it…

Ensuing Complications in the Pants

In writing Family Pants stories, I’m deeply inspired by Seinfeld and Wylie E. Coyote.

Watching Seinfeld one night I had an epiphany. While most people babble Seinfeld is the show about “nothing” I’ve found it to be in fact, about something. It could have been called “Little New York” or the “Small Big Apple”, where 4 characters depart on seemingly totally different ventures and somehow collide and entangle with each other. (Even Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm also deftly links completely different happenings.)

These ensuing complications is not as much of a Seinfeld characteristic as much as comedy 101. I believe Seinfeld’s success was not the gimmick “show about nothing”, the backwards episode or the one about the masturbation contest, but because it simply created basic comedy better than most. As it happens, ensuing complications combined with outrageous silliness is the formula of Road Runner and Wylie E. Coyote cartoons!

So in the latest Family Pants comic strip submission, “The Masked Moo-Moo Menace or the Recycling Reprobates” I tried as skillfully as I could, to connect white noise experiments, bears, rotting meat, COP reality shows and gangland violence to hopefully an interesting and funny outcome.

Hope you dig it when I post it.

Plot Complexity vs Character Complexity

Writing Family Pants stories, I studied lots of TV, as well as comic strips and comic books. Taking a closer look at TV, you’ll find comedies that are character driven. Ordinary everyday situations we can identify with being ridiculously blown apart by the antics of extraordinary characters. Or you’ll find procedural shows, where identifiable everyday characters are solving extraordinary situations, such as a bizarre Las Vegas crime scene. In the procedural show, a fantasy element is the exciting situation. In the comedy the fantasy is being glad you’re not married to the bumbling husband!

In both cases the characters must be interesting, but not necessarily likable. No one would want George Costanza, Archie Bunker, Jack Benny or W.C. Fields as a close friend, but put them in a story and we’re interested to see how it comes out.

Balancing plot and character, you’ll find the more complex one is, the simpler the other. In a popular gangster show, “The Sopranos”, Tony Soprano can spend an entire episode eating prosciutto, and almost nothing happens, yet we intensely watch, wondering what he’s thinking and speculating what he’ll do next. A simple plot, but a complex character. Contrasted to a gangster story from the 1940’s and you’ll find one dimensional cartoonish characters involved in a spider web plot. He’s sleeping with the boss’s lover, who’s angling the boss to save her thief brother, who’s stealing from the boss’s top henchman, who’s angry at the Boss for not permitting the brother’s death because he’s protecting his lover’s sibling and our hero is caught in the middle! Whew!

So you have interesting everyday characters doing the extraordinary in a procedural show or interesting extraordinary characters doing the ordinary in a character driven show. Sometimes the plot is thicker than the characters and sometimes visa versa. But always the characters are interesting.

Although comedy is mostly character driven, you’ll find watching classic Tex Avery, Tom and Jerry or Road Runner cartoons, gags are procedural in nature. Just as you start from a grisly murder and work backward to determine how your team solves the case, you start with a crazy ending “snapshot” with your hero glued to the ceiling in a chicken outfit and work your way backward as to how he got there in the first place.

So I’ve concluded that Family Pants is a procedural comedy where characters fumble over each other in a comedy of errors to a climatic knot. The plots are thick and the characters are interesting yet could be summed up in a word (which in this case happens to start with the letter “a”):