Three years ago I created a seven minute animated film called “Flavio” for Nickelodeon/Frederator Films, about an over-emotional goat who works as a dishwasher in a pizzeria and longs to be a famous inventor like his hero Leonardo DaVinci.

I have not been able to post it on my site because it had to air on telivision first to be eligible for Emmys and Annies and all that stuff that only animators care about. Anyway, I can finally show it. Please check it out and as always I love to here your thoughts!
You can see a production blog about the making of Flavio at Frederator.com and learn more about Flavio here.

Matisyahu is one of the craziest artists I’ve seen but I really dig his music, especially the song above, Youth. He’s a Hasidic reggae hip hop artist and his music is really funky and cool. I think the closest thing to this would be Christian rock as he’s clearly singing about his God, who in many respects is the same as my God. But then again most reggae is about God isn’t it? It’s just a different God. I’ve read some people find it odd that a Jew is singing reggae music but it’s really infectious so it doesn’t bother me. Still, I’m not Jamaican so I don’t know if I was if it would bother me. Simply Red seemed to do it okay but I think they were Jamaican. Not much different than Eminem singing hip hop music or Eric Clapton doing the Blues. At least to me anyway.

I think the thing I like most about him is he wasn’t afraid to take a leap and do what he wanted and didn’t listen to others telling him that his idea was stupid. Artists of all kinds can take a lesson here for sure!

I know I can.

Either way, religious or not, he’s got funk and soul baby!

You can see more of Matisyahu here and read more about him here.

Tatsu: the craziest Roller coaster I’ve ever ridden!

Yesterday my family and I celebrated my daughter Melissa’s 11th birthday by going to Magic Mountain in Valencia. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a Six Flags Theme park and I have to say I had a blast. We went on some of the craziest and sickest rides in the country.

There’s this one called Tatsu which suspends you from a track on your belly as if you’re being held by a dragon’s foot and swoops you through loops and twists and turns. It was the scariest ride I’ve ever been on except if you count my brief stint piloting a fighter jet and pulling 3 G’s. That didn’t end so well and my family still teases me about being white as a ghost when I came off the plane. These rides were a piece of cake compared to it but they were a ton of fun!

We also went on another ride called X which rides you around suspended (again) from a track backwards and the car spins around and around as you twist turn and loop around. You also go about 200 ft in the air, backwards without knowing when you’re going to start your drop. What a ride!

We went on every ride they had there but my favorite was Goliath which has a drop of 250 ft! It was nuts! We went on that twice!

HAHAH! This cracks me up! How stupid can you be? Apparently the RIAA chose it’s first victim in it’s desire to “teach a lesson” to all those naughty music downloaders (which I honestly unerstand). But who was the idiot who decided to choose Jammie Thomas; a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year?

You’ve GOT to be kidding me!

I’m a a self-professed idiot and even I wouldn’t have chosen that poorly.

It sorta makes me glad because now I know for certain there are dumber people than me on the planet!

You can read the full story by clicking the link below.

RIAA Hits a Sour Note With Its File-Sharing Witch Hunt

I’m not sure if this is true but if it is I am sad as I went to art school here. Still, it was a cold and drafty old building and we used to have to wear gloves inside when we drew because it was so frickin’ cold!

So, lately I have been doing nothing but writing. I have just finished my first treatment for an animated feature and am anxiously waiting to see if my boss likes it. I am also actively developing ideas for live action kids films as well and I am having more fun than I have in a long time. I love to draw but to me, writing is sort of like drawing with your mind.

What I love most about writing is that you do not have to use anything but your imagination. The better your imagination is the more outlandish you can go and it does not cost a dime! With making films usually my role comes after the script and it is my job to visualize that script. In the case of writing, (more…)

I love this song but sadly I didn’t realize it’s origins.

Geldof wrote the song after reading a telex report on the shooting spree of 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who fired at children playing in a school playground across the street from her house. She killed two adults and injured eight children and one police officer. Spencer showed no remorse for her crime, and her only explanation for her actions when captured was “I don’t like Mondays.” ^[1] The song was first performed less than a month later at the Fox Theatre, San Diego.^[2]

Weird.

So the last week has been extremely difficult and frustrating for me concerning my computer…My computer. What can I say? It’s not happy and no I ‘m not typing it so I did not solve the problem.
On Tuesday I came up to my studio (a converted guest house in the back) to find a command prompt with the words

Can Not Find the file hal.dll… Please reinstall it and continue.

Well that first of all sucks because it means that my data on there is gone… but that’s not really that bad, having so many other times where I had problems with hard drives etc. I have been diligent with backing up my files and seldom even put them on the C Drive so I was pleased with myself that I had beaten Micro$oft in it’s attempts to destroy me!

I actually laughed out loud!

Still, it meant a complete reinstall which bites.
Fine.

So I fire up my trusty, fully legal I might add, copy of Windows XP but guess what…

The #@%$@^^ computer won’t start from a %!$@$#^ CD.

Greeeaaaaaaat!

I tried 12 times but it wouldn’t start no matter what I did.

I know, I know… there are those of you thinking right now that I needed to set the BIOS to boot from CD first right?

Well I DID that.

Still didn’t work.
So now I’m thinking my computer is fried. Completely gone… crying in the Netherworld heap of dead computers wailing in some cyber-world of doom. Crying for me.
DAMN IT!

Well, I just turned the damn thing off and cursed for a while as I do, kicking things in my path as I stalked around my tiny little studio inventing new curse words and vowing to destroy all computers because I hated them fiercely….

I stalked out of the room raising my one fingered salute towards the new-born door stop that was once my friend.

About a half hour later I came back and remembered I had left my boot disk in the drive so I fired it up fully knowing that it was going to blatently laugh at me with it’s missing file. taunting… DARING me to find new words to curse it with.

Well I was up for the challenge!

I started that sucker up and thought of a few choice new curses made up explicitly for my stupid computer.

But it didn’t happen.

The damn thing started up and booted from the friggin’ CD!

WTF!?!?!?

Anyway, so I reinstalled the operating system and all was great for about two days… My computer and I had made friends… we danced merrily hand in hand in cyber space glancing at one another furtively… There qas nothing that could break us apart.

Or was there?

Suddenly in the midst of my exploration of 3D bliss and learning my selfish and careless computer absent-mindedly lost the frickin hal.dll file yet again! STUPID FOOLISH COMPUTER!

SO NOW?

I JUST DON’T KNOW.

It’s dead. My computer is gone. In the archives. Deceased. An EX Computer.

And me?

HAH! I’m using my Mac Mini!
The one I loathed and sneered at, laughing at it’s silly slow ass beach ball and it’s lazy candy cane attitude dancing happily as I turn it on.

I HATE that.

It’s the end of an era.

Warner Bros Animation, after almost twenty years of cranking out hits and more than 22 Emmy Awards is shutting it’s doors. I have heard they will restructure on the Warner Lot in Burbank and I am sure they will succeed yet again but for me it’s still the closing of a huge chapter of my life.

WBA started the 2nd Golden Age of Animation and really in a lot of ways ushered in the way for studios like Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Cartoon Network to start up themselves. Back in 1989, they OWNED kid’s TV and I am extremely proud to say I was a part of it.

It’s really sad to see WB close it’s doors. For me it is like a family moving away, one you’ll never see again. The kind folks at WB gave me my first break on Tiny Toons way back in 1989 freelance in-betweening for a studio called Kennedy Cartoons (when they sub contracted the work out to them) while I was still in NJ. Then again they gave me my next big break when they hired me to work full time on Tiny Toons, Animaniancs and Tazmania doing layout for them. They yet again helped me when they gave me first directing job years later on Pinky and the Brain (I moved up) Histeria and Detention.

They next gave me yet another big break when they collaborated with Cartoon Network to help me make Swaroop, the first cartoon starring an East Indian boy. But wait! There’s more! A few years later, they hired me to not only direct Xiaolin Showdown, but also picked up TWO development projects (Knights of Sherwood and The Jackalope Boyz)  with me at the same time!

I spent 8 years there off and on during my career and some of the memories were the best I’ve had professionally and personally. I met my wife through a P.A. working on Tazmania. I got married while working on Animaniacs, my wife had our first daughter while I was working on Pinky and the Brain and I lost my grandmother as well during that show’s production. We had our second daughter during the production of Histeria. I lost my mom during production of Swaroop.

A large part of my personal memories are tied in some way to that studio. I owe quite a debt to Warner Bros. and Jean McCurdy, Tom Ruegger, Christopher Keenan, Linda Steiner and Sander Schwartz. They have helped to keep me employed and gave me many good years of memories.

That’s all Folks!