Category — Animation

Well, color me surprised.  I never though my blog would last longer than a Virgin Comic.

Back in 2006, I reported that Virgin had opened a joint venture with Gotham Entertainment to take advantage of a growing comic book and graphic novel market.

According to AWN, Virgin Comics produced 17 comic series in two years, as well as 18 trade paperback collections and three hardcover titles. The owner to the rights to these properties is unclear.

Started by Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra and his son Gotham Chopra, the company’s original goal was to create comics inspired by Indian and Hindu mythology for license out to film and merchandise companies to build global franchises.  Great idea!

As part of their work, Deepak Chopra wrote a biography of Buddha in comic form.  Bad idea!

AWN also reports:

Virgin also created a Director’s Cut line, featuring comics from Hollywood players like actor Edward Norton (DOCK WALLOPER), director Guy Ritchie (GAMEKEEPER) and director John Woo (SEVEN BROTHERS). Virgin hoped to turn these projects into major films.

Virgin’s Voices comic line featured works from actor Nicolas Cage (VOODOO CHILD), adult film star Jenna Jameson (SHADOW HUNTER) and musician Dave Stewart (ZOMBIE BROADWAY).

Ed Norton!??  Deepak Chopra??  Jenna Jameson??   Hmm..  I think they should have looked for more folks like John Woo and Guy Ritchie - at least they make a bit of sense.

Just because a person has had every major orafice of their body violated on camera does not mean that they will make a good comic book.  Maybe it was just the irony of Jenna Jameson making Virgin Comics?

Do other industries do stupid sh*t like this?  Never mind.  Don’t answer that.  I don’t think I could stomach the truth.

Virgin Comics, Comic Books

My brother was philosophizing about cheap clients on his blog.  He is spot on with his commentary.  I’m writing this as unfortunate proof that the sickness in not unique to the animation industry.

How is it that people can be this stupid?

Check out this advertisement for a web design job.

What the heck is his person thinking?  Hmm.  Let’s see.  I have to come to their office, train their sorry butt (because that’s really what they mean by “work with me on this”), and then I have to make 500 pages for their website.

OK.  Project understood.  Now, how much do they want to pay me for this?  UNDER $100!!!!!!!

UNDER $100.  Not even a hundred.  Under that.  Because, at $100, we’d be talking $0.20 a page, which is clearly too much to pay for my services.

Wow.

For anyone wondering, a half way decent website is going to cost you several thousand dollars.  Throw in e-commerce, and it is going to be more.  If you are flexible and willing to use open source stuff and are not a crazy design Nazi, you might be able to get it done for $5-7K.  If you want something that looks unique and professional, it will cost more.

If you want it based on a Content Management System so that you can update it yourself, it will cost even more.

If your site is worth having (financially), then its worth spending money on.  You don’t open a store and expect to do it with $500.  Why would anyone think that they can do it on the web?  ESPECIALLY if you are selling something!  At least with a store, people can come in and look at what you have, see who you are and make a decision to buy from you or not.  On the web, all they have to go by is your site.

Which site would you trust with your personal information? This one:

or this one:

Design matters.  Professionalism matters.  A look of legitimacy matters.  And, all of these are going to cost money.

Oh, and please don’t take this rant as evidence that I think I’m the best web specialist in the world.  Clearly I’m not.  I can’t design worth crap.  Yet, even I’m $250 an hour at my rack rate.  Do I do a lot of web work?  Yup, going on 15 years now.  Why would anyone expect to spend less on their online “entity” than they did on legally setting up their business?  Many lawyers are way more expensive than $250 an hour.  Find a web specialist than can command the same rate, and you won’t be sorry.  If you don’t, your site may look like this:

Anyway, I’m off my soapbox.  Sorry for all the suds.

Web Design, Web Site Costs, Cheap Clients

Do you remember this movie!?  It scared the crap out of me as a kid.  I was searching for something scary to post, and I ran across this pic that I shot last year at Comic-Con. 

Funny, ’cause I actually own Clash of the Titans on DVD now.

Anyway, some people find it odd that I would even mention Halloween, given that I am a Christian.  They see Halloween as a Satanic holiday, and something that all believers should eschew as a natural extension of their faith.

I hear that argument, I do.  I just don’t buy it.

First off, I really could care less about Halloween - to be honest, so I’m not “celebrating” anything.  If nothing else, its an opportunity for my kid to dress up in costume and bum candy from people. Whatever.  The focus that we have is not satanic, its fun and candy, nothing more.

Many people who frown on a Christian letting their kid dress up as Strawberry Shortcake have no problem with something like Christmas - simply because that holiday is supposed to be about Christ.  Well, it started out as a pagan ritual just as Halloween did, yet we’ve made it something different.  Of course, there are also some Christians out there that don’t want to celebrate Christmas either, for the aforementioned reason.  And, that’s fine with me.  But, for those that are frowning, let me remind you of Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37.

I’ll bet they never saw this coming during the initial marketing meeting…

Jim Samples resigns as head of Cartoon Network.

While many of you know this, I thought I would write a note to officially ”announce” that I’ve started a new job as a Solutions Architect for Artesia, the Digital Media Group of Open Text, Inc.

This change concludes a total of almost 8 years at Mainsoft, my previous employer.  Leaving Mainsoft was a tough decision, as the people there are some of the brightest and hardest working folks I’ve ever known.  Their products are rock solid and fit a real need in the market.  I’m truly thankful for my time there.  Eight years is a long time though.  I was looking for something with less cross country travel and something that was more indigenous to my home city of Los Angeles.  Enter Artesia!

Artesia focuses on solutions for the digital media ecosystem, meaning primarily providing Digital Asset Management software for companies who work with digital files.  A mouth full, I know…  In a nutshell, Artesia helps companies with huge amounts of digital content (images, video, Photoshop files, InDesign files, etc…) store, index and categorize that content and then provide for easy searching and distribution of it throughout the enterprise and to their partners.

The usage spans across most industries and verticals.  Companies like Major League Baseball use Artesia as the repository and workflow manager for creating their “Condensed Games” on MLB.TV.  A company like Molson Coors uses Artesia to help them manage brand consistency.  Getty Images uses Artesia to underpin their entire editorial division.  Many uses, but a single architecture.  Very flexible, and very neat!

Headquartered out of Rockville, MD (just outside of D.C.), Artesia is the leading company in the Digital Asset Management space.  Their customer list is hugely impressive, and the people have a lot of vision.  Its exciting to move to a new space and start fresh.  Mainsoft will be a tough act to follow, but Artesia seems to be up to the task.

Artesia, Digital Asset Management, DAM

Hey ya’ll, surf on over to the production blog for my brother’s new show Flavio! The pilot is being done at Frederator Studios and will air on Nickelodean as part of the Random Cartoons project. Very cool!

I’ve seen a zillion of my brother’s ideas over the years and a lot of them are very good, but this is by far the best of them! So, surf on by and drop a comment to show my bro some love! If you do, I’ma gonna put you ona da good guy list!

Flavio, Frederator Studios, What A Cartoon

This news is interesting to me for two reasons.  I love both games and animation , and I’ve also worked closely with IBM for the last few years.

IBM has been making a concentrated effort to push further into the SMB market (small & medium size businesses).  This has traditionally been antithetical to their “big business” mentality, but the SMB market is literally huge.  It also carries more low hanging fruit than the typical Fortune 500 company, that has everybody focused on them.

Turns out that IBM is also making this push into the animation and gaming industries, recently signing deals with Hoplon Infotainment, Online Game Services Inc. and RenderRocket.  The deals are around creating “innovative business models” that haven’t necessarily been considered before for companies of this size.  Read this as online gaming, on-demand delivery and increased reliability for existing gaming communities - basically (buzzword alert!) SOA and SAS.

SOA is a service-oriented architecture, meaning that it is specific content fed through a web service.  SOA abstracts the back end platform that the content or application comes from, and in turn, the provided service needs to know very little about the end user or consumer of the service.  This plug-and-play aspect makes it a real favorite for distributed applications.

SAS stands for Software as a Service, meaning something that sounds similar to SOA, but is very different.  SOA is a decoupled application architecture, whereas SAS means on-demand access to remotely hosted applications.  Think of it as starting up Microsoft Word, but not actually having the software installed on your machine.  Someone else makes sure it is up to date, keeps it security patched and is responsible for proper licensing - you just get to enjoy the benefits of use. 

SAS is a neat phenomenon that is really starting to take off - for 2 reasons: 1) it benefits software vendors, who want to create more reliable income streams from their software, and 2) the end user has no IT headaches regarding an SAS application.  Traditionally the realm of large corporations that need to roll out apps to hundreds or thousands of their employees, SAS is being moved into smaller companies because of the efficiency that it provides.  In fact, I expect that we will continue to see this trend move forward over the next few years and trickle down to the average consumer.

Apparently, what’s good for the goose is also good for the sparrow.

The only problem I see with that, is that we may soon have a monthly software bill, in addition to our cable bill, our internet bill, our phone bill, etc…  Progress costs, and make no mistake, the end user always ends up paying for it - whether it is directly billed like your phone or through higher prices of the end goods, it always comes out of our pockets.

Still, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Are you willing to give up your cell phone?
Kudos to IBM for thinking outside of their blue box.

animation, SAS, SOA, IBM, SMB