captain scratchy beard

Hey, so, I graduated from CalArts quite a while ago, with a degree and everything, but somehow I never got around to posting my films online.  Booooooo on me.  I know.  It's especially terrible because SO MUCH of your life in the Character Animation department at CalArts is spent on somehow, some way, producing a cartoon.  All by yourself.  It's an absolute miracle these things get made at all.  They're hard to do!!

So today, after almost 6 years of sitting on the server at CalArts not being seen by much of anyone, I finally got this thing up on Vimeo!  (I needed help from one of my students to make this happen. Learning never ends, people!)


So here it is, my fourth year film.

Captain Scratchy Beard from brigette b on Vimeo.

Yes, I made cartoons before I made books!  And the girl in my cartoon is reading a book.  How's that for foreshadowing.

Oh yes, by the by:

I get a lot of e-mails from folks (students, mostly) with a lot of questions about a lot of things. Mostly art things.
I'm going to try and do a master "frequently asked questions" post soon, so if there's anything, anything, ANYTHING you wanna ask, please feel free!
You can ask in the comments or e-mail me:  brigette.b@hotmail.com
If you've already e-mailed me, please don't feel bad!  I just get too many to answer individually, and lots of them are the same questions over and over, so it'll be better for everybody in the end if I can just get them all answered at once.
Cool?  Cool.

duck and robot reprise

During my second year of CalArts I got that terrible "sophomore epic" bug. I planned out a film that was way too long, complex, and whose execution was faaaaaaaaar beyond my ability. I had been chipping away at it for a while when I heard a little voice in my head saying, "THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN EVER FINISH THIS, JUST STOP! DO SOMETHING ELSE!" I was already pretty invested in the first idea, and I didn't exactly have a back-up plan...but I did have some drawings of a duck, and a girl robot (who was the girl robot from my first year film that will now sink into obscurity forever since it no longer exists digitally). So I said to Sean, "I uh...I have an idea. A duck, and a robot, go on a picnic. And I don't know what happens in the middle but it ends with dancing!" And so, with about two and a half months left to go, I belted out a couple minutes of cartoon.

That was like, three years ago. Most people would just get over their student film characters and get on with life, but I kind of adore my obnoxious duck and silent robot. So I developed their universe more and pitched my idea to a studio today. Nothing came of it, it really wasn't what they were looking for. But it was fun to hop back into duck/robot world for a while.



There's the robot, the duck, their mailman the International Carrier Pigeon, and their antagonistic television friend. Below that are some little vignettes of stuff that they could do. I might still do some color keys just for kicks!

Also, I had a great birthday with cake and art and presents!

SPEAKING OF CAKE...click this. Thank me later.

ALSO: I would like to report that I just got back from seeing Sleeping Beauty at the El Capitan, and not only was it totally beautiful and great, but I saw June Foray and she was wearing a necklace with a HUGE shiny silver Rocky on it, with rhinestones and everything!! I was so excited that I made everyone else look at it too even though they really didn't care. Someday I TOO will be an aged lady with cartoon jewelry!