Li'l Buggers: Slab 'N' Ernie

Slab 'n' Ernie are real little buggers.

They crave trouble and terrorize the other kids in the neighborhood and are a bad influence on all small things.
Their uncle George Liquor loves the little buggers and thinks they are the greatest kids in the world. Wet clay that he can mold into God-fearing decent Americans.He steeps them in superstition because he believes that only a big dose of fear of the unexplainable can lead to a life of goodness. He takes them into a bare room with 4 concrete walls and asks them "What do you see in here, lads?" They look around confused and say "Uh..nothing!" George says "Then make something up and worship it!"

Like all red-blooded little buggers, Slab 'N' Ernie love cartoons, comic books, video games and George's secret magazine collection hidden above a ceiling tile in the basement rec room.

Their favorite cartoon character in all of cartoondom is the beloved Donald Bastard, meanest and most unintelligible thing on webbed feet.

Donald is not only a wacky cartoon character, he is a mixed martial artist, one of the feather-for-feather greatest ever.Slab N Ernie love to pick on the nerdiest kid in the block, Bobby Bigloaf.Bobby is much smarter than Slab 'N' Ernie, therefore they feel it's their duty to teach him the hierarchy of child life. "Hey fat boy, smart kids are at the bottom of the heap, it's us dumb kids that rule the block!" They instinctively know that someday smart kids will make more money than them, so the time for payback is now while they are still kids. They make a preemptive strike: "THIS is for your 5 room bungalow that'll be PAID for!" they say as they sock him in his freckled belly.

Slab 'N' Ernie are regularly featured on Anderson Cooper's Bullying In America series and George always gets a proud tear in his eye. "I taught 'em everything they know!"

Slab N Ernie are sometimes nice to Bobby, because Bobby has the best comic book collection in town and they love to come over and read all the comics...then pull out all the staples. Bobby has very specific rules about how to handle comic books, but Slab N Ernie ignore them, flicking the staples at Bobby.

SLAB'S FIRST FIST STORYBOARD

Bobby dreams of one day becoming a world famous and influential comic book writer. He buys doubles of all his favorite comic mags and cuts out the word balloons from the copies. He pastes his favorites on the fridge (his secret lair). He memorizes the best writing from the comics. He has a t-shirt with "Unggggghhhh!" written boldly across it.
Bobby'd really rather draw the comics than write them but alas, he does not have the gift of artistic talent. He is always dreaming up new colors of underpants for his comic heroes to wear. "Oh, if only I knew an artist who could see the fantastic colors in my head!" He has a boat load of coloring books. He fills in the pictures with descriptions of the colors since he can't color with crayons very well; he always goes outside the lines (especially with his descriptions of colors) which is a sin. "Emerald green, with a hint of ash-teflon...!" His Mommy is so proud of his verbal color sense.

Bobby loves to go to conventions and dress up as colorful fat heroes or funny animal "toon" characters.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2011/09/heres-something.html

He has created the first super hero character that never works out, who gets his powers from potato chips.


Slab N Ernie love to make fun of him in his costumes. They pick on him constantly but in the end, always get their just desserts. Either George catches them, or the Lord steps in to dish out penance. George: "What you bad boys need is a dose of the Good Book!" He hauls out his heaviest bible and whacks their behinds with it.
http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/2010/03/comic-book-day.html

Slab N Ernie and Bobby are all fascinated by girls. Especially the bad Catholic Girls that live across the railroad tracks and corrupt all good boys who dare to trespass in the bad neighborhood.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/06/bad-catholic-girls-models.html

Slab N Ernie hate homework, but George believes in education - until he finds out what the damn schools are teaching these days!

http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/2010/03/cartoons-vs-homework.html

Simpsons Interview pt 2: Models and Abandoning Inbetweens

CHARACTER MODELS

So I did some character models to give them an idea of how I would draw the characters as caricatures of the Simpsons and then explained that even drawing them that way wouldn’t be enough to achieve what I wanted to do.
I’m even bored with the pose to pose style animation we did at Spumco where the only control we had over the look of the cartoon characters’ acting was in the held layout poses.

My whole experience in TV animation has been to chase a production around from department to department to make sure the original storyboard poses don't get toned down.Which is why I always made sure we at least made lots of layout poses for the animators (across oceans and continents) and instructed them to not redraw them "on-model".The effect of that system was: the characters would strike a funny pose, then basically inbetween into the next funny pose, but between the poses, not much interesting happened. It was a compromise between the 40s cartoon system and the practicalities of Saturday Morning television budgets and schedules.

Bob Camp Layouts from Space Madness

The few episodes that were animated at Carbunkle had much better animation and they added visual interest in the way the characters moved but still based the actions on the held poses. –Held poses by the way that didn’t always work from pose to pose and Carbunkle had to invent some very clever ways to connect them smoothly.

On the Simpsons I wanted to try moving the characters in crazy fun ways, not just looking funny each time they come to a stop. I tried doing layout poses that looked just like this storyboard and the layouts kept looking like toned down versions of the original sketch. And when I began animating I couldn't make it work anyway. So I abandoned trying to interpret it literally and just animated the cycle straight ahead and let it take me where it went.
The intent of the action is the same as the storyboard but the details are different and took advantage of movement rather than just a basic pose with moving legs.
I loved animating Marge's hair so much that it kept threatening to take all the attention away from the walk. I had to fight to keep the hair action as a secondary supplement to the main action.
This project has given me a whole new outlook on hair personality, by the way.
Hair is a feature, just like the eyes and mouth. Hair can reveal intimate secrets of the character living under it.




WEIRD INBETWEEN TRANSITIONS

When you are animating you don’t draw the same kinds of poses as you do when you are drawing layouts. (Just like you don’t write the same kinds of scenes on a typewriter as you do when you storyboard them) You are using a different part of your brain; you are flowing from action to action. This is hard to put into words, but you just draw differently and you think of a lot of things you wouldn’t think of if you were merely drawing individual instances of emotions.

I try different paths to get from one place to the next – but I’m always aware of the context. I don’t change what the characters are doing, I just try to give more specific meaning to how they do it. The inbetweens are as fun to me as the bookended emotions you are aiming at.

No one is happy one instant and then mad the next without some kind of unique transition. Pure inbetweening makes the transition mathematical and cold (even with slow ins and outs and slick timing). In reality, a lot of indecision and emotional torture can happen between 2 different emotions or even just 2 thoughts. I learned this by freeze framing my favorite actors, in particular Kirk Douglas.

next...Kirk Douglas' tormented transitions...

This is Kirk leaving one emotion and on his way to another. It always seems to hurt him to move from feeling to feeling. A real man hates his feelings. Half his muscles try to hold them back, while others crawl towards the next intense one. There's a war going under under the twisting skin of his face. Some of his features resist longer than the others and it makes for wonderful emotional pain and distortion of flesh.

Sasha and Brandon's Homer Hallowe'en

Look what they made. Nice job! That'll sure attract the ghouls for some free candy.

Fredrickstad, Norway

Does anyone live there that can tell me where to find some historic sights, buildings etc?

Simpsons Amid Interview-Longwinded Answers pt 1

AMID: 1.) First things first, what's the backstory here? How did you end up animating a Simpsons opening?

Matt Groening and Al Jean asked me to do it. They showed me an opening that Banksy did that satirized the animation production assembly line system in Korea and told me it was really popular, so they wanted to do something similar with me.

Storyboard
At first they just wanted me to do a storyboard and have their regular crew animate it. If we had done it that way, then no one would even have known that I had anything to do with it because it would have ended up on model and all pose to pose. I showed them the Adult Swim shorts I had been doing and pointed out that the way things happened was even more important than what was happening in my work. You can’t write visual performance. You have to actually draw it.














to be continued...

Watch Adult Swim

Click the pic to see the flick

assisted by:
Jojo Baptista
Tommy Tanner
Geneva Hodgson

CG Moon, Stars, FX: Paul Griswold

Camera and tech help: Alex Vassilev

English voice by Auralynn When, Japanese voice by Hitomi Griswold

Thanks to Jason DeMarco and Mike Lazzo

...and the helpful folks at Toonboom, Karina, J.R. Ron, Bernard

I hope I spelled everyone's name right...