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The Thief and the Cobbler was supposed to be the greatest animated feature film ever created! The film is master animator Richard Williams life’s work, a highly revered legend in the animation industry.Williams labored on his dream project for over 30 years. Sadly, his masterpiece suffered a similar fat such as The Magnificent Ambersons and the unfinished Don Quoxite by Orson Welles. Imagine how much it sucks to have your life’s work taken away from you because of money and then released to the public in a form totally different from that you intended. I call this artist’s hell. That’s the tragic and sad story behind The Thief and the Cobbler.

When he began production in 1964, Williams wanted The Thief and the Cobbler to be his masterpiece, and a milestone in the art of animation. Because its complicated animation and independent funding, The Thief and the Cobbler was in and out of production for over three decades. Williams worked for years as a producer of incredible TV commercials. Every cent he earned went into the gradual independent production of The Thief.

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Mad man Harry Partridge is a UK based animator, writer, voice actor and musician who started his one man show of making cartoons for the web at 16. Since then he has directed shorts for the BBC, Playboy and Nintendo among others and has racked up over 50 million views on his youtube channel alone.

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Get your ART ON! Hola Minions. Today’s podcast has a bunch of really cool things going on! So put down that weak little salad dish, grab that big honkin’ plate and belly up to the Man vs. Art Buffet! Today I read some listener email and we induct Rod Serling into the Pantheon of Awesomeness. Steve Seivers and Dahveed the creators of the independent animated web series Supa Pirate Booty Hunt drop by to talk about their kickstarter campaign.

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Ever notice that whenever you begin an new artistic project like a new book, painting, portfolio, short film, etc that the darned Fear of Failure Demon always seems to drop in to petrify you? You spend sleepless gut wrenching nights where all you can imagine is doom. You toss and turn with dark visions of both yourself and your art as objects of scorn, ridicule, or even worse objects of pity. So you put off trying for the thousandth time, and ditch your dreams. Ask the top painters, cartoonists, designers, illustrators, comic creators, animators, poets, writers, directors, and they will all claim that they are no different! They too have had to deal with the Fear of Failure Demon and have had their shares of crushing disappointment.

I’d like to give a shout out to Krishna Sadashivam The creator of the killer web comic PC Weenies! He called in and left a voice mail question on the Man vs. Art Minion Hotline! He asks what animation studios are looking for in terms of Storyboard Artist Portfolios. Check out the podcast if you want to know what I had to say on that.

Born in 1920 Isaac Asimov was a writer of some of the greatest classic Science Fiction stories of the last hundred years. Of his works The Foundation Series… The Galactic Empire series and his Robot series were major contributions to the world of sci-fi literature. And These are just a few among the 500 books that he wrote or edited in his lifetime.

In particular Asimov’s Robot series generated 2 lasting concepts in science fiction including the invention of a robot’s ‘Positronic’ brain and the 3 laws of Robotics. Both concepts were featured in the movies ‘The Bicentennial Man’ and ‘I Robot’ which were loosely based on his characters.

Lastly I’d like to present you with some samples of the 2D Traditional and some 3D digital Animation my students did from my History and Principles of Animation and Timing for Animation Classes at the Gnomon School of Visual effects in Hollywood California.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:20 — 46.1MB) | Embed Today I want to talk about setting goals and finishing your projects, both client work and personal projects. Sometimes life gets in the way of our art and that’s just the way the charcoal crumbles kids. The last couple of months have [..see full post.]