May, 2008

I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh - one of those Charlie Brown, late 20th Century-type childhoods where, by 6th grade, you've already met every kind of person you ever will meet, though you don't know it yet. Put a 13-year-old Woody Allen-type, complete with glasses, into a Boy Scout troop with a bunch of suburbanized deer hunters, down the street from the mall where George Romero shot Dawn of the Dead - the results are predictable.

I cleverly avoided going to art school, even though I probably could have benefited from it. I majored in something called Cultural Geography, which is one of the few things more useless than an Art degree. But I can still "read a landscape" pretty well.

I suppose I tend to look at things as an outsider, a skeptic, an absurdist. Anyone who fails to see the humor in most situations, particularly the more serious and important situations humans create, is probably an idiot. That applies especially to people who take humor seriously.

I respect people who are able to create and express their own personal voices in whatever style or way that is. The R. Crumbs, the Bill Plymptons, etc. The goal is to try to do your own thing, express yourself in a way that somehow communicates with the world. The particular style or craftsmanship isn't that important to me.

I spent years doing cartoons and illustrations, underground things during an era of clueless slackerdom that seems to have sucked up most of my 20's. Eventually, cheap technology gave me an in to animation. I worked on animated CD-roms, got in on the early web, things progressed... sort of a school of hard-knocks for a soft-headed person.

I'm a big fan of limited animation. And I guess I try to draw naturally... I try not to smash the intuition out of everything. Whatever style I have is born out of accumulated random life experience, myopia, do-it-yourself enthusiasm, laziness, misplaced confidence, obsessiveness, etc. Influences are everywhere, but nothing I've tried hard to really closely ape... that would take all the fun out of it.

Way back in the last century I made a series of extremely obscure self-published comic books called Mishmash. When I got into animation, I needed a name to put on business checks. So Mishmash Media was born. I think it rather accurately encompasses my scattershot interests and schemes. A mishmash.

Flash is my main tool. A lot of time can be spent wrassling it to the ground, fighting to make sure what you end up with is what you want versus what the program wants... and there are a million ways to do almost anything, so I find one has to invent their own work process. The people who keep upgrading it seem to ignore animators and focus on making programmers happy. But it gives me great freedom. These days I draw right into Flash using a Wacom Cintiq. You have complete frame by frame control. If you wanted to, you could animate on ones... not that I want to. Anyway, it gives me a whole studio on my desktop.

I directed the Queer Duck feature out of my apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.   It was a true virtual production studio, animated in about ten months. It was written by Simpson's producer Mike Reiss, produced by Icebox, and funded by Paramount Home


Entertainment. The budget was ridiculously low. The audio was overseen by Mike Reiss in Los Angeles, music by my friend Sam Elwitt in Brooklyn. Rich Codor and I did all the storyboards. Production-wise, it was about 120 short Flash movies assembled in Final Cut. It came out pretty well, better than it should have... and was definitely a learning experience. Hopefully, I'll get to make another feature one day. Another two months would help.

c.2008 Moore Studios, Inc
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