Futureboy Backgrounds

A while back I posted an entry about Futureboy, a character I created about ten years ago while working at a small animation company. You can read all about him here.

I made a couple of very short (2 minutes or so) Futureboy animations in Flash. They turned out OK, so with those projects under my belt, I decided to hatch an even bigger plan: I was going to create a series of Warner Brothers-esque short cartoons that would play in movie theaters before the main feature, just like in the old days.

The fact that you've never sat down in a theater and watched a Futureboy cartoon should tell you what happened. It was a cool idea, but one that was far too ambitious for both me and the company. It would have taken months, maybe even years to single handedly write, animate, voice and direct an entire 7 minute cartoon totally by myself. Futureboy's big screen debut died before it ever got off the drawing board.

I did get far enough into the project to create some Photoshop backgrounds for an animation test.

OK, this one's techically not a background, but I included it anyway. This is an alien ship that lands in the spaceport. Drawn in Photoshop on a ton of layers. All these backgrounds were drawn with the mouse too-- I didn't have a graphic tablet back then, so I should get extra points for difficulty.

In my story outline, a brand new alien species comes to the Spaceport where Futureboy worked. His nervous boss, Mr. Feeny, foolishly put Futureboy in charge of greeting this previously unseen race, and escorting the alien ambassador to the auditorium where it was to give a speech.

As the ship lands, a small green blob slithers out of the ship. Futureboy assumes this is the Ambassador and grabs it and attempts to usher it to the auditorium, running into all sorts of complications along the way. Eventually he delivers the blob to the podium, only to discover it's not an alien at all, but a glob of sewage that plopped out of the ship's waste chute.

Charming, eh? Looking back, maybe it's just as well it never got made after all.

Here's an interior shot of the spaceport, looking out at the alien ship landing on the platform. Note the Jetsons-like flying cars. Somebody's really been waxing that floor!

Just for the heck of it, here's the same view of the spaceport interior sans alien ship.

Here's the exterior view of the council chamber where Futureboy was to deliver the alien ambassador. That's one futuristic looking door!

The most impressive thing about these backgrounds (if I do say so myself) is that they were drawn sans graphic tablet. Every pixel was drawn with the mouse. Don't ask me how.

Who knows, maybe somewhere in a parallel universe people are sitting in a theater watching the finished version of this cartoon before the movie starts. I'm also rich, powerful, 14 feet tall and coated with gold in that universe as well.

Barnyard Art

I was looking through some old backup CDs and found this barnyard scene that I drew circa 1999. It was a test image for an animation project that never quite got off the ground. Funny how often that happens. Well, not funny, but certainly very common.

It was drawn in Photoshop, on about 100 layers. I was trying to recreate the painted look of old Warner Brothers cartoons backgrounds. I didn't know much about simulating paint strokes in Photoshop back then, so it's not as painterly as it could be. I didn't use any of the paint effect brushes, it was all done with just the standard default PShop brush set and various filter effects. Fortunately since then I've learned what the various brushes can do and can simulate paint a lot better.

I didn't have a graphic tablet back then, so it was all done with the mouse. Don't ask me how. Nowadays I wouldn't even attempt such a thing with just the mouse.



Here's a shot of just the barn without the distracting dog in the foreground.