Believe it or not, this webcomic started its life as a simple sketch I created two years ago while I was bored and on a lunch break.  I sketched out a little robot and for some reason thought that he might look cute with a surfboard and flower print swim trunks.  Something about that little sketch felt fresh and interesting.   I knew I was on to something special.

My initial instinct was to develop Robot Beach as an animated film.  However, when I sat down to write the treatment, one page turned into two, two pages into three and three pages turned into nine.  I realized that I wasn’t looking at an animated short.  I was looking at a series of at least a dozen animated shorts.  And that scared me.

You see, I have a wife, a toddler, and two jobs.  Frankly I am afraid the my days of being able to devote a significant amount of time to creating an animated short may be behind me.  (or at least on extended hiatus) I figure that if I give up my weekends and most of my weeknights, I could produce a one-minute short in roughly three months.  Which means a project like Robot Beach would take me 3 years of very serious heads-down work to complete.  I was torn between my desire to tell a great story and my responsibilities as a husband and parent and clearly the film was not going to win that fight.  I didn’t know what I was going to do. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

Most people don’t know this about me, but I am not supposed to be an animator. If you were to hop into a time machine and travel back in time to ask my grade school self what my career is going to be one day I will tell you that I am going to be a jet pilot. That, or a cartoonist.

Cartooning has always been a real passion of mine. When other kids were reading Spiderman and Batman, I was reading Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. I had many comic strip collections lined up on my shelves and I would spend hours pouring over the pages examining the illustration techniques and the joke constructions. I would create my own comics as well. Of course none of them were very good and mostly they were rip-offs of much, much better work, but it was good practice for my future career as a famous cartoonist.

In fact, the portfolio I submitted to the Savannah College of Art and Design was pretty much exclusively comics. (Stuff I had done for local papers and newsletters and the like.) It wasn’t until after I was accepted and was preparing to move halfway across the country that I sorta sobered up a bit and came to the realization that I really wasn’t a natural artist, had little in the way of inspiration and probably wouldn’t be able to get a job yet alone support a family on cartooning. It was at that point that I decided to change my focus and give this strange, new thing called “computer animation” a try. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…