Christmas Time is Here!

Yes with Christmas just five days away you may be in a mad scramble for some last minute Christmas gifts; especially if you are in the northeast and are snowed in. Why not give the gift of animation? How about The Very First Noel! On DVD and available at Amazon, just click HERE.

I finally caught Prep and Landing tonight, which was awesome by the way, and it made me wish our little Christmas show had made into the yearly holiday circuit on TV and cable....tears. If you are some big shot TV exec..could you make that happen please? I will send you a cookie...seriously I will.

Acting Insights

Great acting insights from Sir Ian Mckellen....

Webosaurs: Battle Arena

This is the other webosaurs spot I co-directed and co-animated with Eric Drobile; I did the big ass fight at the end. I wanted this one to be different that the other spots; more like the Marvel comics version of Webosaurs and I'm pretty jazzed with how it turned out. Huge thanks to everyone who made an extra effort on this one. Amy, Chris, Liz, Julie and Frank..big thanks to you guys!

Butter Fingers

So last Sunday we are having dinner...yummy lasagna. I poured myself some wine and as I went to put the half full bottle back in the frig..SWOOSH the bottle just drops out of my hand and hits the the floor...SKADOOSH! Wine and glass went everywhere. The only thing left in my hand was the bottle topper. I was bare foot at the time so I froze immediately..slowly looking down, I expected bleeding piggies. All ten looked ok.

What a lovely mess and a giant waste of wine! Initially I tried lapping up some off the floor but the glass shards made my tongue bleed. After bandaging my tongue and armed with rolls of paper towels and the vacuum, I set about cleaning up the mess. When I was done, I tossed the bag o glass into the garbage can in the garage and FINALLY was able to eat my dinner. My one thought, "at least no one got hurt".....well...at least not yet.

Today... is garbage day. I put on my flip flops and went out to the garage...filled up the garbage can with various miscellaneous bags o trash and tossed in a couple phone books; so now the bag was nice and heavy. Yanked the bag out of the can and began heaving it down to the curb. On the last big heave hoe the bag grazed my foot and immediately I feel a sting. I look and there is a 4 inch long gash across the top of my foot AND it looks a little deep. What the hell did that.....oh CRAP the glass from the wine bottle! Yep some glass was poking out of the bottom of the bag...awesome.

I hobbled into the house and sat in the bathtub. It didn't look as bad as when I slice my knuckle (see Meat Flap) but it was bleeding none the less. No one makes me bleed my own blood better than me. For whatever reason, I always think its a good idea to run water over major injuries. This does 2 things: 1. it makes the injury hurt way more 2. its like turning on the blood faucet because the injury starts to bleed...A LOT; clearly I never went to medical school.

With my wife's help I got band aided up and off to work I hobbled. Thank god for cruise control.

The morale of the story: If you drop the wine you WILL get cut.

More Animation Tips and Tricks

I have a couple more blog postings up at Animation Tips and Tricks. What steps do students often overlook was one from a few days ago. Pose to pose or straight ahead is the latest. Check em out!!

Toy Story 3 trailer

Looking forward to spending some time with the ol toys...

Animation Tips and Tricks

Woohoo!! I'm a guest blogger over at the AnimationTipsandTricks blog. The first question I am answering is: What is the importance of clean blocking? Can you provide some tips on clean blocking?

Quick...go see what I say!!

Cloudy With a Chance of AWESOME!

I took Wonder-pea to see Cloudy opening weekend in normal, boring 2D; I still find it odd that I go to see a CG movie and then request a ticket for the 2D version..the mind boggles. We both enjoyed it quite a lot and I dare say that it is my favorite animated film so far this year. Enjoyable story, fun characters, lots of good honest humor (no pop culture refs) and just entertaining start to finish. The snappy animation style worked well within the world that was created and I look forward to doing some single framing once the DVD comes out. I would love to give that animation style a try...so fun.

In its second weekend Cloudy retained the number one spot only falling 18.8% which is great!! If you haven't seen it yet then shame on you...and your family. Go give it a look, you will be glad you did.

New Webosaurs Spot

I co-wrote and co-directed this spot with my buddy Eric Drobile. We also animated the spot. I did the close up of Horns (Bring it Rexxy!) and the shot with Pterry at the end. Big thanks to everyone involved for making it snowtastic!!!

My Demo Reel

I uploaded my first video to YouTube! The upload/encode process took a looooong time but I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

Steven Spielberg Admires Animators

Maybe directors don't have to be animators first, but it sure is a wonderful thing when they have a clear picture of what they want.....

2012

This is so awesome...that I might have to go see the movie..

Webosaurs spots

Later this summer ReelFx will be launching www.webosaurs.com a massive multiplayer online game aimed at young kids. The game is currently in beta....go give it a try!!

I animated on the Horns! Horns! Horns! spot. I did the shot immediately before the game footage and the shot immediately after the game footage. I also did the back flex shot.





More to come!!!

Meet the Crashes

If you are a fan of TF2 you will love this...if you are not, then you will only like it A LOT..

Ghostbusters: the release party

My buddy Paul Allen invited me to the midnight release party for Terminal Reality's Ghostbusters: the video game which was held last night. I did a little work on a couple cinematic shots for the game, so it was cool of him to invite me. The party itself was open to the public and held at a GameStop near TRI's studio. Lot's o fans turned out for the midnight release, many in home made ghostbuster costumes...and I gotta say they did a mighty awesome job constructing their proton packs.


Photo by Paul

I played an early version of the game about a year ago and it is A LOT of fun. If you ever wanted to blast ghosts while trashing a hotel ballroom, then this is the game for you. I would have played all day.....and now I CAN..because the game is out RIGHT NOW! A big congrats to all the peeps at TRI for making a busting cool game.

Me with the original Ecto-1 and a headless person.


Paul with the original Ecto-1 and some junior Ghostbusters.

Slap Chop

*Update* You can download the Rap Chop song by DJ Steve Porter here.

This has been all the rage around the studio this week... makes me want to buy one.

Twitter

I haven't really been into the online social sites. Between work, spending time with the family, Animation Mentor and fighting crime, I'm just too busy for such things. I did get involved with Facebook, although anymore I'm usually signed in so I can play Mafia Wars or Pirates; join my family/crew!

I had checked out Twitter's main page a few times to see what all the hub bub was about. As near as I could tell it was just a "status update" only version of Facebook. After pronouncing that Twitter was dumb I went on to do other things less dumb, like taking the Facebook quiz which Crayola Crayon Are You?

But last week I finally joined and instantly saw the appeal. It makes stalking celebrities easy and fun! Right now I'm stalking Jon Favreau, David Letterman, Weird Al, Jim Gaffigan, Eddie Izzard and Rainn Wilson. I hope to start stalking more this week. These people are in LA, New York and London, there's no way I could have followed them around on my own. A. it would be expense...all that traveling B. I'm too lazy. Thank you Twitter!!

My twitter home: http://twitter.com/raychase

Going Bonkers

Today is my daughter's 6th birthday. Happy Birthday Wonder-pea!! Over the weekend we celebrated her birthday at Going Bonkers. The place is like Chuck E Cheese except with better pizza, a ginormous play area complete with tunnels and slides and no giant rat.

The ginormous play area is the highlight of Going Bonkers and within minutes of arriving Wonder-pea was off. Now her little brother, Lil Pumpkin, who is 2 and 1/2, wanted to explore the play set as well. The difference: my wife made me go with him. Now I will admit, it was pretty dang fun crawling and climbing through all the levels. Many times I thought "10 year old me would have gone crazy for this", but alas...I'm not 10 anymore.

The play period before pizza and cake was from 11am-noon...one hour; no problem. Lil Pumpkin and I entered the play area at 10:50. At 11:05 I needed a nap. Man oh man do you get a work out crawling through that thing.

My son had no trouble with the climbing and the crawling and since the whole thing is padded there was little chance of him knocking himself out. OK so why did I have to go with him? Basically I was there as his personal bodyguard, making sure the other kids didn't rough him up....or shake him down for pizza money.

Here we are crawling through one of the many tunnels. You can't see Lil Pumpkin because he is way ahead of me. At several points he would be three or more sections ahead of me going "come on Daddy", before climbing up another level. Now the really awesome thing about these tunnels is the many hanging obstacles that you have to push your way through. FUN!

Many times I tried to slow my son down. Lil pumpkin....-gasp-.....wait....I'm coming...-gasp-....lil pumpk....lil.. I told him that he should go on with out me, that I was slowing him down and endangering the mission, but he would have none of it. Apparently we had to keep moving at all times; perhaps raptors were tracking us. I even found a spot on one of the upper sections that was near an AC vent..the air..so cool. Hey buddy let's sit here a sec- come on Daddy!!....I wept, tears of blood.

In the below photo, I'm smiling because we stopped moving for 10 seconds. It was a glorious 10 seconds. In just a moment we would climb the ramp to our left and then roll down the other side. Yippee!! Now I don't have the best posture, but with only four areas large enough to stand up straight, my back was not enjoying the experience.

After an hour of crawling around Satan's playground, it was time for pizza and cake. At this point I was pretty damn hungry and feared that I'd go all "Tazmanian devil" at the first sign of food. Fortunately that didn't happen and the party went great. Barbie was the theme this year, so we got Wonder-pea a Barbie cake which she liked a lot.

All the kiddies seemed to have an awesome time and after the eating and the singing and more eating, the partiers played some games and everyone started to leave. Lil Pumpkin pondered a return to the play area..I could see it in his eyes. I begged him to not take me back in there. There was much whining and crying on my part.

After going bonkers for a total of 3 hours, we were bonkered out. On the way home Wonder-pea recounted all her party fun while Lil Pumpkin slept, tuckered out from all the activity. When we got home I collapsed in the driveway and took a four hour nap.

It was a good day.

Coco-Nutty Monkey

A couple months ago I worked on a commercial for Play Doh, promoting their new Coco-Nutty Monkey toy. I bought one for the kids and they seemed to like it quite a lot. Dad's a hero when he comes home with a monkey.

The animation I did for the spot is up in my animation area. You can check out the entire spot here.

Dragons

I haven't done a DrawerGeeks in forever....this week is Dragons.

25 Things I Hate About Facebook

I laughed...and then I updated my status. Facebook why can't I quit you??!!

The Colonel

the Meaty

Build your own hero at: The Hero Factory

LOST Brotha

Wow he does say that a lot doesn't he...

Open Season 2 Reel

Tonight, the studio held a screening of Open Season 2 at a local theater and I think it turned out pretty well. A big congrats to the ReelFx crew and to the folks at Sony. The DVD was released last week and opened at #1 in DVD sales with $11 million; not including blue ray. Not too shabby.

I have posted my OS2 reel which can be found HERE.

Batman gets pwned

LOST in the background

When watching LOST I always enjoy noticing what the other castaways are doing. You know..the ones in the background...who are toiling away......digging in the sand, chatting it up, nodding a lot when Jack is explaining stuff or just plain hanging about doing nothing. They don't mingle with the cool kids like Sayid, Kate and Sawyer, rather they keep their distance. They don't head off with "the gang" to find food, explore DHARMA stations or any of the useful survival sorts of things. No they basically loiter about waiting to either A. run from the smoke monster B. run from the Others or anyone else that is shooting at them C. nod their heads when Jack is explaining stuff. They are..the ambient castaways.

Now the ambient castaways don't have to be in the background forever. They can elevate themselves to the next level, which is convenient castaway. This can happen when one of the primary characters actually speaks to one of them, for what seems like, the very first time. "Find Kate...person I have never talked to until now." Or they may voice concerns at a tense moment, to which a primary character must respond.

Take last nights season premiere were we are introduced to Neil. He is pissed about the time shifting and is not gonna take it laying down...in the background, where no one can see or hear him. He is up front yelling at Bernard and trading barbs with Sawyer.

This could mean one of two things. Neil is being elevated to official secondary castaway ala Rose and Bernard or.....he will be dead momentarily. Unfortunately for Neil the ladder was true..as he shifted from convenient castaway to expendable. Neil-cabob anyone?

And this is the risk you take as an ambient castaway trying to make the leap to secondary castaway. It is not an easy move by any means, especially if you happen to be annoying. Like Arzt. Remember him? Mr Science Teacher...I'm sooo smart...careful with that dynamite blah blah blah BOOM...your dead.

Or perhaps Nikki and Paolo.

These two made a good effort, slinking their way from the background to the foreground almost overnight. They even went trekking through the jungle with some of the primary characters which is mostly unheard of for anyone below secondary level. A couple episodes later they are being buried alive by Sawyer and Hurley....ewwww nice try.

Now there are those times when the ambient castaway will find himself in the worst predicament of all. This is when they are elevated to conveniently expendable. A sure sign that this is about to happen, is whenever there is a lot of shooting. We may be led to believe that a primary character will be injured or killed, only to have a expendable castaway conveniently get in the way. This is an ambient castaway's worst nightmare.

Background characters, I enjoy watching you hanging about and I want you to be safe, so please heed my advice. Just stay back there. If you absolutely have to talk to a primary character keep it short, do not make eye contact and do not let them learn your name. When an attack comes be sure you are not running nearby any primary character, in fact hang back when the attack first starts as the primaries are always likely to be leading the way. Remember no one is aiming at you because your a nobody....keep it that way and you just might survive.

Planet 51

I'm looking forward to this one....looks fun!!

Meat Flap

This past weekend I put away the last of the Christmas decorations. As much as I love Christmas I was very glad to have the house back to normal. Fortunately, this years deChristmasfication ended without incident...unlike.....last year.

Post-2007 Christmas. It is January '08 and I had just installed some metal shelving racks in the garage to better hold the many tubs o Christmas decor. These racks have L shaped corners which allow for the shelves to be adjusted. As I am bending over to place a tub on the bottom shelf I slipped and fell into the rack, with the top of my left hand slamming into one of the metal L shaped corners.

EEeeeeouch!!! pain shot up my left arm. I pulled my hand back to see that the L corner had sliced the knuckle of my middle finger....pretty darn deep...there was thickness . My knuckle now had a meat flap and I swear I could see bone. Better not look too close or I was sure to pass out in the garage, where I would bleed to death.

Into the house I went, yelling to the wife that I needed a band aid or ten. I stuck my hand in the sink and turned on the water and when the water met meat flap, man or man that hurt. I wrapped my hand in a towel and stuck my hand under my right arm. My wife suggested I go to the doctor, that it would most likely need stitches. Doctor?.... HA!! I have a stable gun if it comes to that and no, I don't need no stinking doctor. I had her call her father instead. He's not a doctor, but he watches them on TV.

While standing there with my hand tucked under my arm, I started to feel dizzy and the tall glass of orange juice didn't help...thanks for nothing vitamin C. My wife's father said I was probably going into shock. Really? Shock? Well ok, let me lay down with my feet elevated. Wonder-pea laid next to me with her feet up. Apparently she was in shock as well. While we laid there in shock, I realized that had the L corner taken the knuckle clean off, I would have most likely died since my body seems unable to handle minor injuries.

After applying pressure to the hand for about 15 min, the bleeding stopped, but I needed to keep my finger completely straight. The slightest bend of either the middle or forefinger was enough to pull the skin around the meat flap and start the bleeding once more. Again I scoffed at the idea of seeking professional medical attention. Instead I took jumbo popsicle sticks and taped em to my middle and forefinger. And oddly enough, it worked quite well at keeping those fingers from bending.

The next morning I took a look at flappie and it seemed to almost be reattached. Small movements of my finger didn't reopen the wound or anything. Amazing! I was like that cheerleader on that show. Until...I rubbed it against a towel...the wrong way.... and the pain and the blood all came rushing back.

I made one last attempt at MacGyvering my injury. This time with the popsicle sticks and a big medical pad (that would be used for a gun shot wound) bandaged on top of ol flappie. Success. My fingers would not bend, nothing would brush up to, rub or otherwise anger flappie...let the healing......begin. Now if only...I could....tie.. my...shoes.....arggh....

Yeah the big ass Sleestack hand I had for the next couple weeks was sort of a pain, but I made do and flappie healed up nicely. And best of all, I didn't have to go to the doctor.

OS2 extended clip

An extended clip from Open Season 2 is available HERE

Billboards are popping up as well. Chad Sellers snapped this one out in LA.