Happy New Year to All My Good Friends

When I started my life as Animan and began this blog, it was 2012.I had no idea what the future would bring. Would people be interested in my vision? Or would they just shrug and turn away? Would they forget about Animan overnight? Life has no guarantees--and it feels very scary at times. But thanks to all of you, I have been very fortunate. 

I hope to continue onward as Animan, and continue creating things that are new and exciting. My only problem is that I am always trying to improve the quality in my work. I found that often, that requires a little more time and effort to make each new Animan adventure.

My sincere thanks to all of you for your patience, as you allow me to keep pushing the envelope.  Your support helps me to go onward and upward. I am very grateful! Happy New Year 2020!

Fun Frames from Jonny Quest

First of all, I want to say "Thank you" to all my wonderful friends and supporters, for making the DD6 video such a big success. Without your support, I couldn't do what I do, so I thank all of you, most humbly.

I want to apologize for letting this blog languish for so long. I tend to spend all my free time doing animation--sometimes to the detriment of everything else. I realized that there is so much fun stuff out there I could be talking about here. All animation and no blogs makes Animan a dull boy!

The other day, I was watching one of my all-time favorite Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows, "Jonny Quest", season one.  The original artwork for the show was done by comic artist extraordinaire Doug Wildey. His drawing skills were so great that the animators who had been drawing Yogi Bear and The Flintstones up to that time, had difficulty trying to emulate his beautiful style.  Often when I'm watching this show on DVD, I'll see a frame or more of video where the drawing sort of went haywire. I love to discover these drawings!

One of the first shows, "The Mystery of the Lizard Men" had a few problematic spots. My favorite hunky character Race is being held by a couple of thugs, and he pulls free, knocking another thug into a tight place. Race suddenly turns into a gooey, squash-and-stretch animation, and it's really fun to see him make the transformation. 

 I get the feeling that live models were sometimes used as a guide for the animators. Race's face looks a little bit too realistic in this frame. Notice the interesting bulge in the lizard man's wetsuit.

 Race is going to ram the villain in the old "bread basket". Making him look all blurry is one way to solve the problem of how to draw it.

I love the villain's face here! For a moment, his green wetsuit goes into full "octopus-mode". Just the bare minimum of Race's face is visible. The animation goes by in an instant, but that's what remote control pause buttons are for.

DD6 Goes On Sale Today!

Please check out the trailer for the latest Animan goody, "Bottoms Up"!

The Animan Site

DD 5 On Sale Now

Hi, Friends!
After what seems like an eternity of drawing, painting, recording and editing, Drippin' Dads 5 is finally ready for purchase.

Here's the link:
http://mranimanstudios.com/shop/

As with all the Drippin' Dad videos, there is an English version and a Spanish version available. Please make sure you click the right one when ordering.

Your purchase of any Animan video goes a long way in helping me continue to produce these animated videos. Thank you for your support!

Hopefully Coming on the 20th of April

April 15, 2019

Dear Friends,
I am still working like crazy on DD5 but I am far from finished. I haven't even had time to create a trailer. So, why is it taking so long? Well, I think I can give a few reasons.

1) In my videos "Filipino Professor" and "Uncle John",  I used a technique called "cut-out puppet". The characters are made of different body parts which are all moved independently by the computer. It is rather complicated, but I like the smooth movement it provides.
One fan of Animan said that it lacked the artistry of drawing all the pictures by hand, rather than manipulating a puppet. So, I have tried to do things the old fashioned way, to give the video a higher artistic quality. Hand-drawn animation is very tedious and super time-consuming. This has resulted in a longer, much longer period of making this movie. 

2) There are a lot of characters in this video. There are also lots of voyeurs, who only blink and don't move--but even THEY require a lot of drawing time. 

3) Some fans have expressed a desire for more dialogue, so I have put a lot into this movie. If you've ever watched an Animan cartoon, hopefully you will have noticed that the mouths are synched to the speech with perfection. I do not use the auto-synch feature of my software, because it doesn't always do a good job. So I do it myself, and it is very time-consuming.

4) I had asked several people to help provide the voices in this video, but that didn't work out. Two people who had offered before, suddenly changed their mind. Another two people had done voices for me before, but after I sent them the script, I never heard back from them. And so, I had to do all the voices myself, at least as well as I could. I did that before in the "Camp" video. I'm hoping that fans will not be too disappointed.  

Other things require time--this video takes place at the beach, so whenever possible, I have even tried to draw grains of sand, to make the movie better! Also, every character has a different style of body hair, and a few times I had to go back and correct mistakes. I get very tired--not so much from the drawing, but rather from the long hours of concentration!

I promise to do my best to finish this video on time. Thank you for your patience and kindness.

Animan

Hard at Work on DD5

I want to thank all my loyal Animan friends and followers for their interest in the next Animan movie, DD5.  So let me show you some artwork I have done so far, for DD5.

                       These are the first characters who appear in the movie.

In the foreground, we can see a towel and some men's swim trunks. Hmmmm!

The main 4 characters are shown in the top picture, but altogether, I think there will be at least 26 different personalities in this video.  One of my first Animan videos which I made back in 2012, was "Coach Ben's Big Beach Adventure". I originally made that one for an adult video contest, and so it was limited to a running time of 5 minutes. After the contest, I added some more animation to make it longer. But when I watch that video now, I see places where I could have done more things and made it more interesting. 

So, this video DD5 will have lots of improvements and be about 13 minutes long. Most Animan videos have about 100 different scenes. DD5 will have 105.  Each scene has to be imagined, drawn and animated separately. So you can see that it's a gigantic amount of work, requiring that I sit at my drawing desk for hundreds of hours.  It also takes time to record the voices and sound effects, and those have to be included in the soundtrack. Something that takes a very long time is synchronizing the characters' mouths with the dialogue. Characters feel more real, when their lips match the conversation.  

I have to make sure that the characters and their clothes (when they're wearing them!) are the correct colors. And a lot of the beach towels in this video are decorated differently, and I have to make sure those are correct, too. These little details seem unimportant, but they can often make the video more interesting to watch, and just make it more fun.

DD5 began with a slow start (all the Animan movies are that way). During this last Christmas and New Year's, I took a trip to the US for 12 days. It was wonderful to spend the holidays relaxing with my friends. When I came home again,  DD5 was waiting for me, and I've been doing my best to pick up the pace. Unfortunately, for the past two weeks now, I had a terrible case of influenza, and was sick in bed for a lot of the time, and I had my outside work to do. It's not possible to sit for hours at my computer when I feel that sick!  My Animan followers are very understanding and patient about that, so I was able to recuperate smoothly.

So, when will DD5 be finished? I cannot say exactly, but I have already finished about 1/4. During the next few weeks,  my outside work will be at a minimum, so I will probably be able to finish the video by the end of March. I will put ALL announcements about the video's release here before then, so please be sure to check back to this blog!