I haven’t updated or done practically anything with the new cartoon because I’ve been busting my hump working on Archer. It just went up on HULU for those who have yet to see it. Please check it out!

I’ve also been fairly active on twitter if you must e-stalk me. There’s a link and a mini-feed on the top right of the blog page.

Just a quick update. Production on the new toon is chugging along. This guy is turning out much longer than my usual cartoons. I’m on my second bottle of production rum.

Also Jeff, yeah that is a reference to your hat.

Story Reel from vishass on Vimeo.

Might swap some stuff in/out, but I think that works?

Tim? How do you come up with your ideas?

That is something I hear hundreds of times a day… always from myself when I can’t think of something to write. Most people who email me questions about the cartoons are more concerned with quoting me, calling me “random”, or asking me how to pirate software.

I get most of my ideas for cartoons from the following places:

• Really stupid conversations with friends. It would be great if all my ideas popped out of a vacuum, but that can be a lot harder than it is worth. Sure some friends seeing your work could be like “hey that’s totally just a conversation we had months ago”. Hopefully, your entire audience isn’t just one person. Don’t forget to thank that person in your work.
• “Improving” other ideas. You know when you armchair quarterback some movie, tv show, comic, or whatever? Instead of just bitching about it, why not take the idea you thought would make the original better and use it as a framework for an original idea. I’m not saying just copy a bunch of other movies and books and give it a new name… unless you call it Eragon and want to make a lot of money. When I do the e-cards, I sometimes go to the card store for inspiration and look for cards I hate and try to figure out how I would fix/ruin them.
• Lack of sleep can give me some weird ideas, and a few times I’ve had to roll out of bed while I was drifting off to jot down some notes. I don’t want to say keep a journal by your bed, but if you spend a lot of time thinking about dumb stuff before drifting off to sleep, it may be a good idea.

Now all that said, I am making it up as I go along. My degrees are in visual arts and animation and not creative writing. My biggest suggestion to animators (especially students) out there is if writing something good is proving impossible then stop. Stop wasting your time. Don’t risk toiling over animating some half baked crap script. Find someone who can write or try to adapt a preexisting short story.

Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for coming up with ideas.

Above is what passes for a script and storyboard for one of these toons. Those blocks on the right are the storyboard. The doodles and words on the left are sort of the “script”, and there are about four more pages of those. They aren’t necessarily in order. From that mess of words and doodles, I pick out the bits I like and stick them in the storyboard. I only sort of use the boards to set up shots, but it also gives me an excuse to quit dithering and nail down what stupid joke I am going to use in one segment or another. These individual boards usually just cover “shots”, and I whip up more detailed breakdowns if I plan on moving someone around or make a marshmallow shoot blood out of its eyes.

This is also how my writing process for the JibJab pieces tend to work, although there you have an additional step of translating the story and sometimes lines of dialog into a short email for approvals and suggestions.

The nightmare is over. Or it will be… probably! Someday! Production has begun on a new cartoon. I guess. Above is the first character drawn for what will surely be about 2 minutes of stuff I can’t put on any professional demo reel. All that is left is everything that isn’t that drawing of a cat and the several pages of crazy person ramblings and doodles I call a script.

I plan to keep the blog updated with production notes, but I’m really secretive about my stuff for some stupid reason. Oh no, I hope someone doesn’t steal my idea to make barely animated people talk about ding dongs and then show the ding dongs!! I’ll be ruined. Worse, my ding dongs will be ruined!

note: I’m aware there’s a weird skip at the end. I’m trying to make that go away, but I think it may be a codec issue in my source files.

http://twitter.com/bigmoneytim