Floyd Bishop

When I was a kid, one of my earliest animation related memories was of the Disney cartoon “Lonesome Ghosts”.  Our family doctor had a toy called the Fisher Price Cartoon Viewer, a toy which had interchangeable cartridges which were sections of cartoons. One of my favorites was “Lonesome Ghosts”.

I used to watch the section with Mickey in the flood and Goofy with the dresser over and over again, forward and backward.  It was a great way to see the overlapping action of how things moved and followed the main movement of the characters. I didn’t know this at the time. I was just watching a cartoon.

What are some of your early cartoon influences?

-Floyd Bishop 

You might remember the Frederator Studios production tag we’re making for Fred. The first version was done before we got any input from Fred. After talking it through and watching it over and over, it’s clear that the robot doesn’t read as well as it could (it’s tiny in the large frame), and the big green “F” on the robot’s chest is hard to read at best.

For inspiration as to how you could handle such a task, we had to look no further than the 1950’s:

The production tag is much shorter than this intro piece, so we’ll have to have a lot happening fast. Keep watching to see what we come up with.

-Floyd Bishop

We’ve finished the first version of the Frederator Studios production tag. We render everything in passes to allow us more control over the final image, so I’ll break down what goes into a piece like this.

Let’s look at frame 40.

[Read more…]

This is the background we plan on using for the production tag. The purple nebula on the left of the image is the same purple used on the graphic version of the Fredbot you see on the Frederator main page.

Lisa Illowsky created the starfield background using Maya’s PaintFX.

-Floyd Bishop

We’ve got the animation pretty much nailed down here. The Fredbot flies in and comes in for a landing and stands on the text. We swapped the text to read “Frederator Studios” instead of “Frederator Incorporated”, as per Fred’s notes.

The effect of the flight trail is in here as well. There are two emitters: one which lays out the trail, and then another “burn out” emitter that gives the puff when the trail stops (right before the Fredbot lands). The effects will be rendered in a separate pass to allow for more control during the composite.

Next up, textures and lighting.

-Floyd Bishop

So after listening to the audio track a bunch of times, I started to think about the amount of text, readability, and what the heck I was going to do with that rivet sound.

In the text only tag that is being used now, you can’t read anything until the piece is half over. There are no words on the screen at all. I wanted to get the text on sooner, as well as incorporate the robot somehow. I also wanted to give a feeling of depth.

In our first blocking pass, we’ve got the text appearing with the rivet sounds. This gets the text on much sooner, allowing you to read “Frederator” almost a full second sooner than before. We also have the Fredbot in there, swooping in from the distance.

The background is going to be a space type environment. I was thinking “What would look good in CG, at a [Read more…]

Remember this? If you’ve seen any Frederator shows on Nickelodeon, then you’ve no doubt seen it more than a few times.

Fred asked us to come up with a CG production tag. He also mentioned he’d like to use the same audio if possible. This is actually a pretty tough project. The text has to read clearly, it has to be memorable, and it has to happen really quickly.

I started to think about other production tags that stick out in my mind.

I want to do something that shows depth, will look nice in HD, has the Fredbot, and uses the same audio as the other production tag.

Keep watching to see what we’re coming up with!

-Floyd Bishop

I guess it’s a good thing that The Happy Pumpkin is still getting views?

These kids didn’t do as well with the video as this other kid did.

In case you missed it, here is the original video:

At first I felt a bit bad about the videos of little kids getting scared. It’s not cool to be responsible for kids’ nightmares, but then I remembered the winged monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, and how bad they scared me as a kid. I then imagined the kids I was scaring were maybe the distant relatives of the guys in those monkey suits, and in some weird way I was getting them back through the terror of their relatives. I don’t feel so bad about it now.

-Floyd Bishop

I’ve temporarily traded Maya for Microsoft Office while I write an article for the upcoming ASIFA Magazine. The topic of the article is the independent animator and how they can use the internet to their advantage. I’ll be covering everything from self promotion to film distribution. The magazine is only available to ASIFA members, so if you’re not a member, you’re out of luck.

In the meantime, get a website, put your films on YouTube, and submit your stuff to Channel Frederator!

-Floyd Bishop

After reading Fred’s recent post about David Karp, I started to think about how age discrimination often seems to work in reverse.

If you look at the image of the early Microsoft, everyone seems too young to know what they are doing. Obviously, this wasn’t he case. If you look at David, or any of the other young people in the article Fred linked to, you wouldn’t necessarily think they are capable of what they have already accomplished.

At a voice recording session last week, some people from a film crew assumed I was an intern. This happens a lot.

I guess the point of this post is to never judge a person’s achievements or abilities based on their age (or their assumed age). Not all brilliant people are old white haired men, and not all twenty somethings are scatterbrained extras from Jackass.

-Floyd Bishop