No mas France!

We're back. The return flight was complicated. We had a connecting flight that failed to account for the fact that we're no longer on the same schedule as Paris for the resetting the clocks an hour back. Subsequently, our flight landed quite a bit later than promised. Ah well, it all worked out in the end.

I'm going to have alot of favorite memories to look back on. Quotes that resonate due to the context or the intent behind the statement. But the one that I will probably always return to is:

"Umm... that's alot of blood."

Indeed. It was more blood than anyone expected in the small Paris hotel room.

I saw some French things while I was there, but I am very self obsessed, and nothing of the sights of France can really compare to a naturally sunlit loft studio full of really high in demand talented people working day in and day out on a project of your own conception.

Enough with my jibber jabber! Here is some more art!



This is Larry. He's a werewolf. If you read my last entry, you know that he is doomed.



This is Evey, the rotten little Witch. I think that she might be conducting a marching band in this image. Not sure on that one.

...

Again, the above images were provided by Eric Jones and Rikki Simons. They think they're so damn special.

More to come soon!

I have no more Euros...

France is interesting. I've been here for five days and I have yet to see a single insect. I have yet to smell human urine at a doorway and I have yet to be awoken by gunfire.

To be fair, I've only seen about two blocks of France. The distance between the hotel and the studio. And really, why would I wander from these two points. I try to explain to our co-workers in the studio that this isn't work for either Eric or myself. This s what we do for fun.

On top of the massive amount of brainstorming and creative work being done in the studio itself, I've written a dozen or so detailed synopses in my off hours in the hotel room. Eric has been writing them as well, but I don't feel like sharing credit right now. He gets all the adulation for his artwork after all. No one ever says: "Hey Landry, nice drawing!". So yeah. it was me. I wrote them. I wrote them all.

To hell with you and your precious "artwork", Eric.

Here's a few of the story concepts (very short version) we've been working on:

1. Frank begins stealing brains.
2. The Devil tries to kill himself.
3. Carl gets ears.
4. Shelly turns everyone into ducks.
5. Larry dies.

Time is too short to post pictures. We've taken many of the studio and of the production team. We also have stacks and stacks of art that we will slowly release into the wild. Prepare yourself for this onslaught! It will arrive in due time!

Je ne comprends pas le français!!!

That's right, folks -- X-Ray Studios has gone international. We've been smack in the heart of Paris for a few days now, having set up camp in the swanky offices of our hosts. We're surrounded by some very talented people who are doing some amazing work, and we're both very excited to see what happens next. Until then, here's a quick rundown of what we've been up to:

• Hours-long "power meetings" regarding story ideas, character designs and sets
• Gaping at the mountain of beautiful art and design work the team has already produced in the last month or so
• Spending the entire work day at the office, producing as much material as possible in terms of both writing and art
• Going back to our tiny hotel room and working some more
• Struggling terribly to simply order McDonald's food, particularly in the sense that I'm trying to sound vaguely like a native when I say "Deux Royale Cheese et Deux Grande Frites". I'm somehow certain that I have failed to do so on both my French McDonald's excursions thus far. Soon enough. Then they'll all be sorry...
  

No doubt some of you understand from the headline of this entry that I don't understand French. Very little of it, anyway. Neither does Landry. That's okay though, because we're working with lots of people who either A) understand and speak English or B) are patient enough to work through both an interpreter and elaborate sign language to get the job done. I'm telling you, there's nothing like a bunch of people waving their arms around, making faces at each other in an effort to collaborate creatively. If only all collaboration was like that... Although come to think of it, half the time it is like that.

The other half, in my experience, involves punching the other guy a lot. I'm trying to restrain myself in our new surroundings, though. We'll see how that goes.

Voice casting...

We leave for France in a couple of hours. We'll be there for over a week working on Little Gloomy for animation, and on Friday we're supposed to discuss voice casting for the various characters. In my head, they all sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Subsequently, we are open to suggestions. Except for Carl and Dracula. We know who should do them.

We've already gone straight to our primary source on topics like this. But we figured we should solicit multiple opinions. We'll probably ignore them all, and instead recommend Arnold. Still, any ideas would be appreciated.

Actually, I don't think anyone reads this blog, so I don't really expect a response. But I'm cross posting this time from the X-Ray Studios Livejournal. Those people like us. They'll respond. Not like you guys and your sullen glares and palpable disinterest. We know you're out there just waiting for us to turn our backs. Just waiting for the moment when we stumble. Then you will strike.

Our plan is to update regularly while we're in France. But we'll be in France and someone else is paying, so we'll see if we actually manage to do anything online at all.

Roughs!

Here are a couple of roughs I did a month or so ago, giving the team in Paris something to work from for environments. I drew a big pile of these using my famous "ball point on printer paper" technique, before switching to the more grown-up-sounding "brush-tip markers on bristol board" approach.

An interesting thing, drawing these background images ~ it makes me realize that for everything I know about Gloomy's world, there's still a lot that I don't. A luxury I've had since Little Gloomy's inception in 1998 has been that I could "cheat" the backgrounds. If a scene called for a specific feature in Gloomy's house or Simon's castle, I could just pretend it had always been there from the get-go, draw it there and tah-dah! There it was. Now, I have to think far, far ahead: will Gloomy need a telephone in her foyer? A pot rack in the kitchen? Is there a tree in her front yard? Yup, that's the stuff that's gumming up my brainworks right now, a veritable logjam of maybes, possiblys and I-don't-knows. Plus, things like "agh! This marker is drying out already! I just bought this thing, and it wasn't cheap!", and "must drink third RockStar of the day. Too tired to go on..."

...but I digress.

I am still producing these environment roughs right now (well, not right now, since it's 5:00 am, but you know what I mean), giving everybody involved as clear an idea as possible of what Frightsylvania looks like. Here's hoping that I don't forget anything or, barring that, that I can at least pin it on Landry if I do.

-Eric

Character development...

It's odd, I've worked on these characters for almost a decade. Only one other writer than myself has ever tackled them in print (and that would be the overly talented Dan Brereton), yet there are aspects about these creations that I had never put into words before.

Working on a television show is an interesting creative stretch. It's not enough to express your character for a single scene. You have to say that this is definitively how said character will ALWAYS react. And you have to apply appropriate conditional modifiers... "Little Gloomy is cynical" is not sufficient. "Little Gloomy is cynical about the sensational, and terribly excited about the mundane" is a start.

So anyway, I had to write out lengthy descriptions of the psychology of each character. How they view the world and how they view each and every supporting character. How they react and how their reactions are different dependent upon who they are in the company of. I hadn't thought overly much about this before, yet the writing only took a couple of hours. It was all there in my head, despite not actively thinking about it.

But you few who read this blog do not care. You only want pretty pictures. I will oblige. Here are two more character illustrations by Eric Jones, colored by Rikki Simons:

This is the scientist, Simon Von Simon. He's evil and apparently unaware that zombies are preparing to eat him.


This is Mummy. He only speaks in hieroglyphics. How we'll resolve that one in television has been troubling me for years and years.

We begin...

Welcome to the blog about The Super Scary Monster Show/Little Gloomy's continuing journey from the comics page to animation. We've been a long time on this road, with our first offer coming way back 2001. We're very picky and ridiculously demanding people, so we declined to pursue the Hollywood dream at that stage. Currently, we're working to bring Little Gloomy to the world of animation. Mostly, this involves alot of phone calls. However, sometimes we actually write and draw things. The intent is to show a few of those things here, and provide an update on our activities whenever possible.

Included here are a few of the recent character designs as presented as samples back in May. They're illustrated by Eric Jones and colored by Rikki Simons.



This first is clearly Little Gloomy being menaced by some kind of fancy elf shadow demon.



This one is Carl Cthulhu. He's happy that he's escaping the clutches of some kind of horrible flower generating heart monster. Also, he has a bear.



This is Shelly. Her visage burns your very soul.

...

More to come soon.

-Lan