This Is My Life (And It's Ending One Minute At A Time)

FINALLY. Episode 3 of Ronin Dojo Community College DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga is DONE!

In this installment, the Fed's have Mark and Barry in a corner with enough evidence to put them away for however long they put you away for pirating a shit load of movies. But a special guest inadvertently comes to their rescue. Nobody puts Barry in a corner!

This one had a lot of trouble behind the scenes. The past three days have had Matt and I up until 5 and 6 in the morning, trying to rush this thing together. I'll post more on that later, but for right now I have to thank the peoples who made this cartoon more awesome than we could.

Big thanks to Tim Martin and Emily Tarver for doing the voices of Hank Henderson and Agent Wilkins. They both have been real good sports about recording in our shanty town style bedroom studio, and always help us come with good lines on the fly. That porcelain city bit- all Tim.

Thanks to Darrell for offering his help in scanning and cleaning all of our shitty drawings. It's one of the lesser glorious tasks in animation but his help made all the difference.

And thanks to Dan for helping us pull some SFX and Andrew Kudlick and Jonah Beram- we're going to keep reusing the animation you made for us- FOOOREVER.


And to repeat my previous post, Matt and I will be in Boston this Friday and Saturday for a screening the Boston Underground Film Festival is putting on. It's called "New York Spawned A Monster" and it features the animation of famed indie animator Patrick Smith and- me. There's a screening from 6pm-8pm at Space 242, and a Q&A at noon on Saturday at the same place. It's free but you have to RSVP. So come on down, or up, depending on where you live.

Ok, done hocking shit. Here's the Indiana Cat poster Matt put togther. Click on it to get a huge version for your desktop.

Dress In All Black So Please Call Me Chris Gaines

So, Matt and I have been real busy with a bunch of work. I've been constructing a new tutorial post on our cleaning process, but thought I'd just make a quick post here to tell everybody two important things.
1. Episode Numero Tres of Ronin Dojo Community College DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga, coming out this Monday, February 23rd. We're working our asses off on it as we speak. Should be good. We got an old favorite making a reappearance. Old being the operative hint in that sentence. So make sure you check it out. And if you haven't seen any of the Digital Pirates Saga, check out this Youtube playlist.


2. Next Friday, February 27th, I'm going to be in Boston screening some of my animation. The awesome peoples at the Boston Underground Film Festival have invited me to show an exorbitant amount of my work alongside indie animator, Pat Smith. The event will be from 6pm-8pm at:

Space 242
242 E. Berkeley Street, 2nd Floor
Boston, MA 02118

So if you're in the Boston area, and want to see some For Tax Reasons animation in a setting other than on your work computer while wearing headphones, then come on down. I'll be there just standing around, wondering why I don't have new shoes yet. My current shoes are completely ripped up the side. If I do get new shoes by next week, then I'll be wondering if anyone notices that my No Sweat chucks are practically glow in the dark because they don't have any dirt on them. Yeah that thought conversation's not gonna last long.

There may be a artist talk on Saturday, with Pat Smith, myself and For Tax Reasons Matt, but I'm still waiting for details on that. But whatever. You get the deal. More info on Monday. Bostonians, come on down- we can talk about Big D and the Kids Table.

I've Got A Black Hole In My Mind

I've been working on a music video for the awesome pop punk band, Teenage Bottlerocket, and things are starting to come together. I scanned in some of my work to do a little lip sync test. Check it out.

While making the Ben Weasel music video, I discovered that animating the lip sync for a person singing requires a more than my standard set of 10 mouths I use for speech. Talking is relatively fast, so I can get away with popping between mouth shapes with little notice of the change. However the drawn out movements of singing require a few inbetween's here and there to make everything look smooth. So I draw one AH mouth and then a slightly smaller AH mouth to cushion the mouth movements. Several varying sizes of OO mouths, and so on and so forth.

It's not perfect, but it works ok, and I need to cut all the corners I can when I'm making this thing on my own.

Anyways, here's a head pencil test I did of Ray nodding his head along to the music. There's no music in the clip so you can just imagine him nodding along to anything. Maybe a song, maybe a school presentation you're working on about the Marshall Plan or something. I don't know, go nuts.

How We Animate: Part I: The Equipment

My inbox and the For Tax Reasons inbox have received a lot of emails asking about how we do our animation. "A lot" being a relative term. We've gotten more spammy notices about Comicon than questions about animation in our For Tax Reasons account. But whatever. I thought I'd do several posts about How We Animate. I decided not to say "How To Animate", because I think that's a bit too forceful if not completely arrogant. There are a lot of ways to animate, we're always looking to streamline and perfect our process- so the For Tax Reasons method is neither preferred nor perfect. It's just what we get away with. So if you can accept that into your heart- then we can begin.

The Equipment

Drawing Utensils. For the initial drawings, I use Col-Erase erasable colored pencils. They allow you to rough out out drawings and discern between multiple layers, and then roughly clean up with a black line over top. I sometimes use 2 HB Mirado Black Warrior pencils for the clean up, but lately I've been experimenting with these Rapidomatic mechanical pencils. They help me keep a thinner and more consistent line.

Peg bar. In order to keep each drawing "registered" with one another, or in the same place, you're going to need specially punched paper that fits to a specially molded peg bar. These can be hard to come by in a brick and mortar art store. In NYC, I get mine from the the New York Central Art Supply, but you can find them online. Just do some searches. I use the plastic Acme peg bars.


Hole punch. These things can be fucking expensive. Most of these items, aside from the computer stuff, you can get for decent prices. But animation hole punches are such a niche product, so they always seem to be high priced. CartoonSupples.com/Lightfoot Ltd. has one for $599. There might be some cheaper ones out there, maybe on eBay. I'm lucky enough to be borrowing one from a co-worker.

The upside to having your own hole punch is you don't have to wait for a ream of punched paper to ship. And when you're pretty lax on stocking supplies like myself, it really helps to have a puncher at your side.

Paper. So if you don't feel like shelling out 600 bones for a punch, you'll have to buy pre-punched paper. (I could make a link again to Cartoonsupplies/Lightfood but I'm not sure if they have the best prices for punched paper).

If you're going the hole puncher route- any 81/2x 11 copy paper will do. I usually buy recycled, even though it sometimes has a rougher grain and some more flecks in it. It's worth it, planet wise, since I've resisted the jump to the paperless animation route- mostly due my lack of skill on a Wacom tablet and the expense of Cintiqs.


Lightbox. You might be able to find Light Tracers and Porta-Trace's at some art stores around town since people can use them for photography and making stencils and stuff. If you search for these things on Amazon, they come up in weird categories like Home Improvement or Home & Garden. Strange.

I've got a Porta-Trace light box with two lights in it. It's great for seeing through 3 or more drawings, and I like not having a pegbar molded to the drawing surface. It gives you more free space and flexiblity. However, there are some great swivel light boxes that allow you to spin around your drawings; simulating a full on animation desk. Those are great for cleaning up. It's easiest for me to draw downward strokes, so having that option of spinning the drawing around so that I making the same general hand movements is great. It's a personal preference in the end.

If you're good with crafts and DIY building, you can make an animation desk with wood, a sheet of plastic and some flourescent lights. Works just the same. And you'll be much cooler or doing it on your own.

Camera & Tripod. To do pencil tests, you're going to need a tripod and any video camera that can send a feed to your computer. I use an old camera hooks up to my computer via firewire, and run the pencil tests using the demo of a program called FrameThief. I talk a a little bit about pencil tests in this blog post.

Scanner. Stores like Best Buy and the dying Circuit City barely have a selection of scanners that aren't those bigger print/fax/scan in one deals. It's kind of sad how electronic stores have turned into giant cell phone kiosks and TV dealers. Anyways, don't buy H.P. scanners. I'm sure they're just as high quality as any other scanner, but their scanning interface sucks.

Even if you're using Photoshop, you have to capture a scan via the scanners own interface. Since you're scanning hundreds of drawings, that have to line up with one another, you're going to want your scan marquee and settings to be the same each time- so you can just keep hitting SCAN. With the H.P. interface, the scan settings reset each time. If you want to save your scan settings, you have to make a little scan profile and load it each time you scan. It's just an extra, annoying step, and you've already got enough clicking to do.

I use an Epson Perfection. It's Advanced User interface allows for a good amount of tweaking, it saves the most recently used scan marquee and doesn't create some blown out auto setting each time you preview a new scan.


Microphone. If you're going to record dialogue for your shorts, you might want to invest in a semi decent microphone. I went down to Guitar Center and bought this AT4040 Cardioid Condensor mic at the advice of some sound engineers at my work. It's been working well for me, but I'm sure there's a myriad of models that'd do just fine.


MBox2 Mini. This piece of hardware allows you to record and edit in Pro Tools LE. It's the cheapest and smallest of their systems, but does in no way lack in quality. If you really need to, you could probably record using some shareware programs, like ones for podcasting, to capture and roughyl edit audio. I know that Final Cut has a Voice Over tool you could probably use to the same end. However Pro Tools is premiere audio program, and I make everyone do a billion takes and like to throw fancy ass compressors on my tracks to sweeten them up like sugar- so it's good for me.

Computer. Sorry Luddites, you're gonna need to borrow or buy one to do what we do, and it should probably be a Mac. I come from a Mac Family. Even though we started with a Commodore 64 (moving next to an archaic orange text on black screen laptop, then an Emerson IBM Compatible) we eventually made the switch to Apple and never looked back.

It was part of an entire childhood and adolescence as the secondary option underdog. I was a Jew, who owned a Sega Genesis and had Mac computers. How much more of an outcast can you get? My people suffered for years. I was persecuted in C++ class. The PC kids wrote "SMACK THE MAC" in binary on the white board. It was traumatic, but I made it through. And now I can stand proud and tall without fear of ridicule for my Apple Heritage. Complain about coffee shop hipsters all you want- we have survived.

Books. Ok, the last but most important part. If you're going to make animation like we do, you're going to need to LEARN TO ANIMATE. I can't go into detail on how to do that, I'm not smart enough. But if you want to learn, check out these books:

The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams
Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair

Or Animation Meat, as Smo pointed out to me. Other blogs and forums have some notes and practice stuff posted on them, all from much more reputable sources than myself. So search those out too.


Ok so that's part one. Sorry it was so long. The next step will be about scanning, cleaning and coloring your work. So look out for it soon. And sorry for all the unintentional product endorsements. If anyone asks, I told you to steal everything.

Everything but the peg bars.

Episode 2.5!

Check it out folks, it's RDCCDX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga- Episode 2.5: "Parking Garage Diplomacy".

Oy vey, this was supposed to be a short little mini episode we could easily churn out, but it turned into some Deep Throat-CSM-Work-a-Thon for Matt and I. But hey, we said we'd release it Monday. I hope somebody noticed that, because we really were working hard to stick to that deadline.

EDIT: Ok, now I got a second to breathe. A big thanks goes out to Tim Martin and Emily Tarver who did the voices as well as collaborated with us and Zack Scheer to make this little ditty. Episode 2.5 was a fun one to work on because it was fresh and new. All of the "full" episodes were written & recorded months ago, so the material feels a bit stale and old to Matt and myself. But for this one, we got to bring everyone into the room together to record and throw around ideas. It was a fun change of pace. We also got to experiment in the drawing department with some lighting and perspective. Even though it nearly drove me insane, I'm please with how the backgrounds turned out. Seriously, I felt like I spent an entire day trying to draw one background. I'll post them later on, I'm too tired right now. I'm going to go eat a banana.

Everything I ever wanted to know about perspective drawing I learned in junior year of college and then forgot

Before I begin this post I must state that I am in no way an expert or even at perspective drawing. But after a marathon session of drawing, and then complaining to Matt while he was trying to watch wrestling, we both finally remembered some of the basics that the incomparable Matt Sheridan taught us in college. I thought I would share my meager knowledge today.

So, this is how you figure out proportions of equidistant crap in perspective. I'm talking about like, if you're drawing a row of doors down a hallway or telephone poles disappearing into the desert horizon. That's the classic example they use in drawing classes- for some reason. I'm down with it; something romantic about the American Southwest indeed. Anyways, for my purposes I'm drawing cement poles in a parking garage, since that's where the next mini episode of RDCCDX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga takes place. I had to figure out where to place all these poles in a manner that looked like they were equally space apart yet getting smaller in the distance. Here's how I did it, and how you can do it- in 6 easy steps.

Step 1: get yourself a vanishing point. Most art stores carry them- some places online sell them in bulk. Don't worry about brand, they're all the same. So you get some vanishing points. If you're doing one point perspective, put down, one- if you're doing two point perspective- you put down two. Since I'm a simpleton- I did one point perspective. So here goes my dot.
Phew. Ok. Step 2: lay out your horizon line (the line in red there) and then make two lines for the angle of the stuff your drawing. In my case, these purple lines marked where I wanted the tops and bottoms of the cement poles to go.
Step three- draw some vertical lines. I drew where I wanted two of the cement poles to go.
Ok, so at this point I was like "Man, I think these poles are spaced too far apart, I need to draw a pole in between these two- but HOW?". Conventional widsom says, just find the halfway point between the two verticals. Well, conventional wisdom is wrong- cuz you're in the twisted world of perspective- up is down, black is white, god is dead and geometric algorithims rule with an iron fist. So what do you do? Step 4: Draw an X between the two verticals.
The center of that X is the halfway point between those two verticals. Amazing! But shit, I wanted to draw some more poles. You know like, ones going far into the distance, how do I figure out where thos are? I have nothing to make an X between- WHY IS LIFE SO CRUEL!?

Step 5: Draw a line from your vanishing point- through the center of your X. In my case it was pretty close to the horizon line, so I'll just use that again.

Step 6: Draw a diagonal from the top of one of your verticals through where the center line meets the next diagonal. Where that line touches the bottom diagonal- is where your next pole would go. It sounds complicated, but it's not- I'm just really bad at explaining things. LOOK AT DRAWING!
You can keep doing variations of this X/diagonal method to figure out where things should go. For this drawing I kinda winged some of it, but the used that whole technique as a basis for laying it all down.
Man, that took a while. And I got 5 more to go. Woo and a hoo. The next RDCCDX mini episode is coming out this Monday. Be ready and keep watching the medicine cabinets- KEEP WATCHING THE MEDICINE CABINETS!

Back to (the) drawing boards

Matt and I started drawing boards for Episode 2.5 and Episode 3 of Ronin Dojo Community College DX: The Digital Pirates of Dark Water Saga. 2.5 proved to be particularly difficult, as it takes place in a parking garage. It's a great location, with all sorts of cinematic possibilities-angles and perspective and repeating patterns vanishing into the distance and all sorts of other things which are hard for me to draw.

In these cases, photo reference is key- and the internet is the lazy animator's god. There was a beautiful spread of photos of vast, empty parking garages on Flickr. But even with an array of moody photos at our fingertips, it was still hard to turn the space around in our heads and fit things to what we wanted. If this weren't for a minute long piece, we'd probably have to haul our asses out to a Home Depot or something.

In other news, I've started experimenting with brushes and inking. I've been kinda frustrated lately, wondering why my drawings never look smooth and sweet like everybody elses. And I guess reading Bone was the last straw.

I went out and bought some small water color brushes, india ink and a pad of vellum. Not sure if these are the right tools or not, I was just kinda winging it on some advice my friend Kudlick had given me. So, here's a new Ronin Dojo t-shirt design I've been working on, which I inked with a mix of brushes and Micron pens.



I was mixing the brushes and pen out of necessity, my hand isn't steady enough to make thin details with a brush. However when I found Youtube vids of Jeff Smith and Jim Lee doing it too, I realized it was kosher and felt a bit better about myself. I really have no concept of how professional people go about things, cut me some slack.

Anyways, now I'm gonna go paint with some smashed berries.