Mutating

Okay, so... it's been over two years since I last posted on this thing.  If you're reading this, I'm as surprised as you must be.

Here's the deal:  I'm taking things into my own hands, and I'm just making something.  To save my soul and my sanity, to learn and grow, and to return to doing what I love the most.  Which is pretty much "as I damn well please".  In short, I'm making a movie.  Or a movie trailer and several scenes.  And I'm in so deep now that I'm pretty much pot-committed.

It's a post-apocalyptic buddy action/comedy flick about a guy and his mutant dog called Dead Meat.  And I think you'll like it.  If you want to follow along for the next year and share in the wonder/horror of what is to come, visit me at my tumblr.

http://maxwellatoms.tumblr.com/

Peace, sucka's!

Fish Hooks 4-Eva!

Hey y'alls. I'm working on getting this blog sorted out. Every day I get dozens of comments and I can't possibly respond to them all. Of course, they're not from you. They're all ads for Bingo and Chinese hair creme and pharmaceuticals. But I'll deal with that later.

Today is all about Fish Hooks! The show doesn't premiere officially until the end of the month, but tonight there's a sneak preview of the show on Disney Channel after the conclusion of Camp Rock II. Somewhere between 9:30 and 10, I'm guessing.

So come check out what Noah Z. Jones, Bill Reiss, C.H. Greenblatt, yours truly, and a whole bunch of other awesome folks have been working on for the past year! It's like nothing else on Disney Channel, but I think you'll find that it fits right in. Hope you like it!

I'm not on Twitter

So if you're getting tweets or twits or whatever from me... it ain't me.

Amended:  Now I am on Twitter.  @GrimUnicorn.  But I'm scared and I don't know what I'm doing.

My Big Fat Stinky Wedding

Well, not mine. But tonight on "Chowder", everyone's favoirite animated fart cloud is getting married. It's the second and final board I did for the show, and is the last thing anyone will ever see that I did for Cartoon Network. Hope you enjoy it!

Billy and Mandy and Chowder stuff on Ebay

I'm totally delinquent putting this up, but there are some original drawings by myself and C.H. Greenblatt on Ebay.

http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/just_a_paddy

It's all for charity, so the question is, can you afford NOT to own these babies? Plus, who draws on paper anymore? In five years we'll project cartoons psychically into the minds of others and antique works of art like these will be worth billions!

Old School

I remembered this curious device the other night while I was trying to go to sleep. I used to sit in the back of the car on long trips and make animations on this thing. It couldn't really replace the Flip-Book Madness that killed the majority of the paper pads that found their way into my parent's house, but it was pretty fun. It got me thinking about how I ended up in this crazy business and why I do things the way I do now.

I think I started painting on the computer in, well... certainly the early '80's. We used to have an Atari computer. No, that's not an Atari 2600.

It was frickin' Atari Computer.

Yeah, so, that was the life of a young nerd. I used to program my own games in Basic. Most were Zork-style text games, but I remember doing some reeeealy crude graphics on a Road Warrior-style car shooter. The cars were big green cubes. So were their bullets.

A few years later I graduated to Deluxe Paint where I spent a week trying to reproduce a tiger photograph down to the pixel. I'm sure today it would probably hilarious and make an excellent T-shirt.

Deluxe Paint (Or "Dpaint" as the people on the BBS used to call it. See how old I am?) was responsible for my very first paying art gig for a little (or it was back then) studio called Epic. I remember painstakingly placing individual pixels until deciding that finally someone might decide that what I'd made sort-of resembled a hulking mutant in a test tube.

Before college ended, I worked on a game being produced for Epic that never saw the light of day due to some silly squabbling between the producers and unfinished sound code. The game was to be the first full-screen animated game on the PC. Meaning cinematic-style animation, though still composed of too-few pixels to be really believable. Vector-based. Sort of a proto-Flash. For two years I dragged pixellated lines around until they formed shapes that I prayed would be interpreted as a cartoony superhero. And it actually came out pretty good, as I recall.

Photoshop didn't enter the picture until after I moved to L.A., and I remember being really resistant to it at first. I'm not even sure when that changed.

I'm not sure where I was going with this trip down Memory Lane, but... hey look! I posted in my own blog!

Hello--oh-oh-oh...

Echo-oh-oh-oh...

The Annies went well (as well as could be expected-- we didn't win) and Kung-Fu Panda destroyed everything in its path. Not many surprises, but good to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while.

I've been busy since New Year's dressing up my pitches all sexy-like and teaching them how to go out and earn some bread, and now I'm gonna send 'em out on the streets for the first time. Let's just hope they know what they're doing, the stupid pitches.

In the mean time, I've done something I swore I'd never do again-- cohabitating! There goes the dream of being George Clooney Jr. Still, I've never been so happy. Well, except for being unemployed and having to build tons of Ikea furniture. I'm starting to hate the name "Billy".

So pretty much I'm in another spot where I've got nothing to show you guys for a while. So here's a cheesy picture from the Annies of Jay Bastian (CN executive), James Silverman (producer of Underfist), some goon, and Greg Eagles (Grim). Damn, what a bunch of handsome livestock.



It takes a loong while for anything to get going in TV, but if you don't hear from me in a few months you can assume I've either won the lottery, given up and moved to Canada where people get paid to make cartoons, or am crying myself to sleep at night. Or all three.

When the stuff starts coming back up here it'll be coming up fast and furious, like a breasfast burrito. I'm starting to work on my vinyl toys again and once I get some sketches done I'll share 'em here since I've really got nothing to lose (or gain, really) on those babies.

Stay sharp. Trust no one!