THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Well, I’m back in Lance’s crew again. So is everyone else that went on retakes. I’ve been trying to crank out my scenes but I don’t feel like I’m getting enough done. Not only that but house buying stuff got in the way of work today and I spent most of my Thursday out of the office. I ended up coming in around 5 o’clock to at least put in 2 hours and I have to stay late Friday plus come in on Saturday. Dang it! I just need one week when I can just do my job without interruption.

On a lighter note, most of us in the crew that went to Comic Con, began showing off our “loot”. It’s fun to see what other people picked up at the Con. It also suck when you know what you missed out on. Luckily many of the things that I didn’t get I can get in other places. I just have to save up little bits of my money to get them.

Today, apparently, there was a company meeting at the studio were they welcomed the King of the Hill crew to the studio. King of the Hill is part of our company and three years ago, when we moved to the new studio in Burbank (Our old studio was in North Hollywood), the King of the Hill crew didn’t come along because the show was canceled at the time. When it was picked up again they began production at the North Hollywood studio. This week they officially moved in to the Burbank studio and are using the space that the Simpsons Movie was using. I didn’t go to the meeting because I wasn’t even at work this morning due to the above mentioned house buying thing. Oh, and just thought I’d mention that my dad works on King of the Hill drawing Backgrounds. Welcome to the new studio Pop!

FAMILY

Today, (Thursday 9^th) is my baby daughter’s birthday. She is 1 year old. She spent her day at Abuelita’s (‘grandma’ in Spanish) house and had fun with her tios (aunts and uncles in Spanish). She ate her first cupcake. I’m told that after taking a large bite out of it she turned up to everyone around her with a face full of frosting and said, “Mmmmm.” I wasn’t there because I went into work as stated above. I’m so angry at that house buying stuff that really screwed up the day.

The Munchkin is such a cutie pie. Here’s a picture of her with my wife:

She looks NOTHING like me (thank God!). The only thing she got from me is my hair (not seen in this picture). And my brilliant mind, of course. 🙂

MY WEEK

Today is also my friend Amiee’s birthday. I was going to draw a silly picture of me doing something stupid like I usually do but I decided to draw Amiee a picture for her birthday instead. Her online blog/diary said jokingly that she wanted one of Gankutsuou. I only have time during the week to draw one picture so I drew it instead of what I was going to do. Here it is. I wish it was better drawn but…

It’s a drawing of Gankutusou. It’s a Japanese Cartoon (anime) that re-imagines the story of The Count of Monte Cristo (one of my favorite books) and puts it in a weird Sci Fi setting. It’s really interesting. The Count (Gankutusou) comes across as this weird vampiric alien from another galaxy. The art direction in the cartoon is really strange as well. It’s not for everyone but I like it and so does Amiee. Happy Birthday Amiee!

QUESTION

I have a question for you. I’m gonna put a little illustrated diary I made of a trip to Rome that my wife and I took in 2005. I showed it to a few people and they thought it was funny so I thought I’d put it up on the site. It was hand written but my handwriting is so bad, I went back and put in clean type instead. I’m going to create a page just for it on this blog. The original is in black and white but I thought since I’m going to put it up on the site, I should color it. Here is a sample of what page 5 of the diary looks like, without color:

(By the way, you can click on some of these images to make them bigger)

My question is:

Would you like me to put the diary up in black and white right away so you can read it, OR do you want me to wait until it’s all colored?

If I put it up in black and white, I will replace the black and white pages with the colored versions as I finish coloring them.

Please let me know what you’d like. Thank you.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Show #8 has begun. That’s the show I’m working on right now. Directed by Lance Kramer with Assistant Director (A.D.) Tommy Tejeda. Lance has been on the show forever. Long before I showed up. When I first started working on the show, Lance was a layout artist like myself. He’s a lot a fun to work with. I first worked under Lance when he was an A.D. for Director Bob Anderson. Lance is a huge Star Wars geek and Indiana Jones geek. He even named his dog Indiana. His side of the office has a bunch of little Star Wars figurines all over.

Tommy is from Argentina. He was also on the show when I first began working there. He wanted to try something new after working on the show for so long so he decided to try out for a position on the Superman Animated series at Warner Brothers. His artwork impressed Bruce Timm and he got hired. I forgot how long he was there, needless to say he ended up, not only working on the Superman cartoon but also on the new Batman animated show, Batman Beyond, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. All shows that I absolutely love! After the shows were over, he came back to The Simpsons and quickly became an A.D. after a short time doing Layout. Tommy is also a Star Wars geek.

Working with them is a blast. It’s fun talking with them because all we do is talk about geeky things.

We are just finishing Act I and next week I’ll begin working on my section of Act II. I’ll explain the process of making a Simpsons episode in a later post. Just thought you might like to know a little about one of the directing teams that make up the Simpsons crew.

MY WEEK

Just thought I’d get one more article in before next week. It’s going to be a really a crazy one. I spent most of Saturday on the computer checking the blog and working on downloading plugins for WordPress that I can’t seem to make work. I’m just computer stupid. I feel like the computer is mocking me sometimes.

Sometimes I feel the computer is mocking me.

I’m really surprised at how much feedback I’ve gotten on just one post. Makes me happy.

I discovered that the WordPress website theme I was using wouldn’t let me modify it without recoding it, so I changed it. In other words, it didn’t have widgets. Problem was that all the other themes had messed up RSS feeds. So I just copied and pasted the RSS feed code from the last theme and I stuck it in this one. That helped.

FAMILY

It was my dad’s birthday yesterday and I forgot to call him. I’m a terrible son. Luckily I was able to wish him a happy birthday at a family get together that same night. HAPPY BIRTHDAY POP!

It was my father-in-laws birthday the day before, which I think is kinda funny.

I took The Munchkin for a walk today. “The Munchkin” is my pet name for my eleven month old daughter Elizabeth Haley. I took her for a walk so I could let my wife Alesha have some time to read the new Harry Potter book. (She got it this morning and as I type this she is almost done with it. SHEESH!) Our walk was very long. The Munchkin and I entered a DVD/Video game store I like to go to sometimes and came out with an eight dollar Teletubies DVD for her. We also went into a Borders books store and I saw a book about the art of ‘Surfs Up‘ (the Computer Generated (C.G.) movie about surfing penguins). I personally feel that, that movie was horribly over looked. I thought it was fantastic. The story was great, it was really funny, the documentary feel of the movie was unique, and the designs where incredible. I don’t know why more people didn’t see that movie. (Can you tell me why you didn’t see it?) Needless to say, I wanted to get the book, but I can’t because I’m saving my money for Comic Con. (Sigh) hopefully I’ll have some extra cash for next month.

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