Dog Daze

Hey Everyone,

I finally figured out how to post full boards. In the future I'll be posting TUFF Puppy boards as the episodes air, and FOP stuff as well. First up is Dog Daze - my first Tuff Puppy assignment!

Dog Daze

Is it candy?

Here's a few pages from my Thunder Dog board.

It was my favorite script from Season 1 of Tuff Puppy; and I was super stoked I got to board it.

Moustache Kid

Ever notice how just about everything in El Tigre has a moustache? Robots, lobsters, goats....Anything even remotely masculine. Heck, even some of the women have moustaches!

It's pure Jorge Gutierrez. He's the undisputed King Of the Moustache Cartoon. He's made at least three whole cartoons completely about moustaches, and they're all awesome. Coincidentally, all three (including this one) were storyboarded by the very talented, but moustacheless, Ricky Garduno.

Corel Painter Blues

Corel Painter 9 was the standard program we used for digital storyboarding. It was a great application – super easy to learn, and the tools really mimicked traditional media well. Unlike Photoshop it was designed to paint pictures, so it could do a really good job without too much customization of brushes, or writing of scripts. Unfortunately there were a few problems. Problem #1 It crashed constantly. Problem #2 The default Painter RIFF format would fragment our hard drives like crazy. Problem #3 The RIFF format would frequently get corrupted resulting in the “green screen of death” - a lime green layer that would destroy all of the art in a file. And all attempts to find a work around just made things weirder. To avoid disk fragmentation these Riffs were saved as Photoshop PSD’s. But for whatever reason, every time I’d open them, the images would get turn blue! First time – a little blueish tint. Second time - more blue. Third time – almost totally blue! And after they were uploaded – they turned brown, yellow and purple! Maybe Painter 10 is better…..

El Tigre El Jefe

Some stories are a lot harder to pull off than others. This was one of them. But thanks to the awesome storyboard by Eddie Trigueros, great music by Shawn Patterson, and beautifully executed animation by Boulder, this one turned out in the end.

Adios Amigos

This is one of my favorite episodes for a number of reasons. It has lot of heart, a great board by Ricky Garduno, terrific music by Shawn Patterson, and stunningly great direction by Roman Laney and Tod Polson.

The inspiration for this episode came from a traveling carnival that had set up in my neighborhood church parking lot (presumably so that when the amusements fell apart, the prayers of those aboard could be more easily heard by the Almighty.) Definitely the kind of place that only people actively courting danger could enjoy. People like Manny and Frida.

Visually, we needed somewhere even cooler than a carnival to stage our climax, so naturally we went with secret volcano lair. The Pantera Pit obviously owes a lot to the bat cave, but to me it was more a nod to the greatest secret volcano lair ever, Ernst Blofeld's, rocket snatching headquarters in 1967's, "You Only Live Twice."

...If only we could have had ninjas attack at the end.

Beatboards

It’s a very hard to tell another artist what you want to see using words. So, one of the things I do as a Director, is a beatboard – which describes in pictures, how I’d like to see the key moments of the storyboard handled.

Black Cuervo was the first episode to go into production. Extra time was added to the schedule so artists could get used to drawing digitally. I got a little extra time as well, which is why this beatboard is the largest.