Gene Hamm's feature Hell Toupee is 75 minutes long and took Hamm three years to animate single-handedly. In Hell Toupee, when genetically engineered killer toupees escape from a lab on an isolated island, a female local barber must stop them from taking over the world.  Hell Toupee was originally a graphic novel by Hamm which is available on Amazon.
    Hamm wrote the story, animated the film, composed the music and voiced some of the characters. The other two voice actors were Samantha Lane who voiced the heroine and Ted Smith who voiced the villain.
    Hamm moved up to the Bay Area to work on the Gumby TV series after working in Hollywood on TV series such as The Smurfs, Superfriends, Plastic Man and such music videos as the title song of Big Trouble in Little China, Howard Jones’ Like To Get To Know You Well, and Michael Bolton’s Everybody’s Crazy.  He worked for Roger Corman on Battle Beyond The Stars.  His first job in Hollywood was in 1978 for Ralph Bakshi on Lord Of The Rings.
    In the Bay Area he worked on the cult TV series Liquid Television and animated the villains in Dick Tracy,  Sega’s first video game made in America.  He taught animation and storyboards in person and online for Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
    Hamm is the author of the book How To Get A Job In Animation And Keep It.  Currently he hosts How To Caricature for Airbnb Online Experiences where he teaches you how to caricature and draw cartoons with simple tricks he learned working in Hollywood cartoon studios.
    The song “Love Like There Is No Tomorrow” from Hell Toupee is on Spotify and Apple Music.
    Gene is available for interviews about Hell Toupee at [email protected] or (707)235-9064.

This week Airbnb approved my second Online Experience class: How To Caricature Bodies.  My first class How To Caricature has received over 150 five star reviews and has been enjoyed by individuals and corporations all over the world.  In the first class I drew caricatures of all the guests, showed them how to draw the cartoon head from every angle, add expressions to the face and how to create their own "all purpose critter" by changing one or two facial elements on the face.
In my new class we concentrate on the body and show you how to draw two and four-legged characters and hands.  Both classes show simple tips and tricks I learned working at Hollywood animation studios, things they don't teach in art school, but should.  People who think they can't draw at the beginning of my classes are pleasantly surprised at their new found ability at the end.  Along the way they do a lot of laughing as well as learning.
https://www.airbnb.com/experiences/1683951?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=a0c7e8b3-8d87-42d2-9cf6-1c7b781d636e&fbclid=IwAR2mpZGB5uizGv5bOCCrBUAd4AQEPXXBNmjji-PClNcLtYrBkA1y3hjW17g

I've been animating furiously (well maybe not furiously, I'm pretty happy) to turn my graphic novel Hell Toupee into a feature.  Early in January I previewed the first 27 minutes of it as a cliffhanger at the Hell's Kitchen NYC Festival and it won Best Animation.  Now it is 47 minutes long and the distributor wants it 70 minutes long.  I am expanding and deepening the story and I think improving it.  I am aiming to finish it by the end of 2020.  I will keep you updated here.  You can also see nearly daily updates on Facebook if you friend me.

The Dream Hat, Gene Hamm's first animated feature is now for sale on GumRoad.com.  In a village where everyone has lost the ability to dream, a little boy goes on a desparate journey to find the secret of The Dream Hat.
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It is packaged with Gene's animated short Cook For Your Life.  Can the last three animals on the farm who haven't been eaten turn the farmer into a vegetarian before lunchtime.  Part comedy/part cooking show.

Gene Hamm's How To Caricature Is now an Online Experience at AirBnB.com  If you, or your family, friends, or co-workers are looking for a fun two hour class, animator Gene Hamm will show you how to exaggerate or bring out the features of a person in a simple cartoon.  He will make it fun and easy.  All you need is a pencil and a few sheets of copy paper.

During the online Zoom class, Gene will draw everyone and then email the drawings after the class,  And to keep it fair, you can draw as silly a caricature of Gene as you want.

Gene learned to draw caricatures down in Hollywood animation studios where the animators were always caricaturing each other.

The class makes a great birthday present, or part of a holiday party.  It also livens up some Zoom meetings.

Just click on How To Caricature.

I was sad to discover that Dan Spiegle passed away in January of this year.  There were no art classes in my town when I was a kid.  He was the person who taught me how to draw, from reading his comic books.  As a kid, I watched a lot of TV and he drew comic book versions of TV shows and movies for Dell and then for Gold Key.  He drew Maverick, Colt .45, Lawman, Shotgun Blade, The Rifleman, Johnny Ringo, Wyatt Earp, Texas John Slaughter, Sea Hunt, The Untouchables, My Favorite Martian, The Green Hornet, and The Invaders.
 
He drew adaptations of movies such as John Paul Jones, Yellowstone Kelly, Son of Flubber, Mary Poppins, Mutiny On The Bounty and Atlantis The Lost Continent.
What I loved about his comics were the accuracy.  Maverick looked like James Garner.  The Rifleman looked like Chuck Connors.  Lawman looked like John Russell.  The props looked right too.  He got the Rifleman's rifle right and Johnny RIngo's seven shooter.  The cars and Thompson submachine guns looked right in The Untouchables.  Black Beauty and the stinger looked right in The Green Hornet.  When the aliens died and immolated in a red mist, it looked just like they did in The Invaders.

Sometimes his comics were way better than the TV shows or movies he adapted to comics.  His Sea Hunt was way more exciting than Lloyd Bridges TV show.  Since he did such a good job on two of Warner Brothers TV shows:  Maverick and Lawman, I wish he could have done other Warner Brothers TV shows such as 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Cheyenne. (But Alex Toth and Russ Manning did a great job on 77 Sunset Strip. Toth also did a good job on Sugarfoot.  Whoever drew Cheyenne did an awful job.  It didn't look like Clint Walker).  Indirectly Spiegle got another crack at it when he illustrated Yellow Stone Kelly and did an accurate job of portraying Clint Walker and Edd Byrnes (from 77 Sunset Strip).

Rarely would Spiegle get it wrong.  In John Paul Jones, his drawings of Robert Stack looked more like James Garner, but he got it right when a few years later he drew Eliot Ness.  It looked exactly like Stack.

I learned to draw scenery from Spiegle.  I still draw hills and cliffs, trees and oceans with him in mind.

He also did comics that weren't based on TV, such as Space Family Robinson and Korak Son of Tarzan.

Unlike Marvel, who gave credit to their artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Dell didn't let their artists sign their work for a long time.  I guess they were afraid if they got a following, they would ask for more money.  I could alwaysrecognize Speigle's style though I didn't know his name.  Later they let him sign "DS".  Still later he signed "Dan Spiegle".  Around 1971 I tried to get a job at Dell drawing comics.  I talked to Chase Craig, Spiegle's editor.  I didn't get the job, but during the interview, behind Chase Craig were original panels by Dan Spiegle of Korak Son of Tarzan.  I asked for Dan Speigle's address and Craig gave it to me.  Then I became pen pals with my hero.
 
He had an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, California, right next to Santa Barbara.  I  visited him three times.  He was always an affable friendly man who encouraged me.  And he always gave me a basket of avocados when I left.  The last time I saw him, his wife Marie served me a slice of homemade cherry pie.  Spiegle showed me his "morgue" where he had clippings of magazines of people, places and things to draw from.  That was why his comics were so accurate.  He told me when he got busy, his daughter inked his pencil drawings.  He told me when he was assigned the job to draw Maverick, there were no photographs to draw from so they brought him to the studio to draw James Garner on the set.  Garner was in the jail cell in that scene and between takes let Spiegle draw him.  He said Garner was friendly and very nice to him.
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Dan Spiegle drew a lot more comics than I have mentioned here, (such as the marvelous Crossfire), but the ones that really influenced me were the TV and movie adaptations.  I am sorry he is gone.  But he lived a long life.  He made it to 96.  He played tennis into his 80's.  There will never be another comic artist like him.

HELL TOUPEE, my graphic novel, is now available as an iBook on iTunes. Click here to download HELL TOUPEE. When the world's first genetically engineered living toupees escape from the lab on an island off the U.S. coast and go on a murderous rampage, the only person who can save the world is Rose Thorne, the local barber.  She makes Sweeney Todd seem like Floyd the Barber.  HELL TOUPEE is a slam bang action/horror story with satire of corporate and government corruption and baby boomers' vain attempt to recapture their youth.  During the course of this big adventure, Rose is full of quotable wisecracks.  Readers have called HELL TOUPEE "Scooby Doo on acid." (Personally, I think I was more influenced by Jonny Quest than Scooby Doo).

As an animator, I set out to do a graphic novel a little differently.  It always bothered me readers of a comic book page could always skip to the bottom and ruin the suspense or ruin a gag.  To keep that from happening and to keep the pages turning, I wanted to only show one panel per page.  I was allowed to do that with iBooks.  It came out like a slideshow, or a storyboard.  I also hope to turn it into an animated feature sometime in the near future.

It is $10.99 on iTunes.  I think that is a bargain since it is 867 panels.  Sometime soon, I will have a serialized version of HELL TOUPEE on iTunes in three parts.  Each part will be $5.99.

With iTunes and iBook Author, I was able to have it come out the way I wanted it.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you like it, please recommend it to your friends.  If you hate it, please recommend it to your enemies.  Either way, I make a sale and can keep making more graphic novels.

Soon Hell Toupee will be available in ePub format that can be read on iPads and mobile phones.  It will be available as a complete ebook and serialized in three parts.  As you can see from the covers above Part Two has two killer toupees and Part Three has three killer toupees.  It visually implies the way they multiply.
Keep looking here and on my Facebook page for updates on availability.

I once designed a conceptual art piece called "Using The Proper Tools Blues".  Onstage was a grand piano and a huge block of granite about as high as the piano.  Two musicians dressed in tails would come onstage.  One sat down on the piano bench and one sat on a chair behind the block of granite.  The musician at the piano pulled out a paintbrush with no paint on it.  The musician at the block of granite pulled out a violin bow.  When the conductor gave the downbeat, the musician at the piano began to paint the piano keys and the musician at the block of granite began running the violin bow across the block of granite.  Despite the furious activity, neither musician was making a sound.  Hence the name "Using The Proper Tools Blues".

 Marshall McLuhan who first studied how media affected us said that when new technology is introduced, it includes the old technology.  Television was a combination of radio and film.  Computers are now a fact of life in the arts and in filmmaking, but when they were first introduced, they mimicked the old technology. Digital software is virtual and is not subject to the laws of the physical world such as gravity and fiction.  To attract users of the old technology, programmers had to build in some of those remnants of the physical world.

If a tool makes a job easier, it is the proper tool.  If it makes the job harder, it is the wrong tool.

Final Cut Pro was one of the first editing programs designed to replace the physical cutting of film.  Before computers came along, cutting film was a long and tedious process.  You had to have bins where you could hang pieces of film so it stayed off the dirty floor.  Then you could grab those pieces and splice them together with the other pieces of film.  In the digital virtual world, you didn't have to hang pieces of film anymore.  But Final Cut Pro made virtual bins anyway.  They built in the inconvenience of film, even though the inconvenience was obsolete in the virtual world.

To create a cross dissolve in film, you had to gradually decrease the exposure of one piece of film down from 100% to 0% while increasing a second piece of film from 0% to 100%.  This film had to be sent to a film lab where it double exposed the the two pieces of film onto a third piece of film.  A real pain in the ass.  In the virtual world of Final Cut Pro, this long process was no longer necessary.  You could just drag and drop the cross dissolve in between clips and instantly see it like in Apple's iMovie.  But in Final Cut Pro, after dragging and dropping a cross dissolve between shots, you had to wait for it to render before you could see if you liked the cross dissolve or not.  They had to build in the pain is the ass to make people familiar with the old technology comfortable in their misery.

iMovie was simple and straight forward.  You just dragged and dropped a transition and could immediately play it without rendering to see if you liked it.  Before iMovie, desktop publishing was possible on computers.  After iMovie, desktop movie making and editing was possible.  iMovie was what made me switch from the Amiga to the Mac.

Another pioneering art program was Photoshop which mimicked traditional painting tools.  In Photoshop, you couldn’t just hit the ground running with a brush.  You had to “configure” the brush.  This consisted of going through several menus and sub’menus, choosing the taper of the brush, the wetness of the brush, the fall off of the brush, the shape of the brush.  By the time you had gone through all these choices, you forgot why you originally wanted to use the brush.

ArtRage is a very powerful painting tool with a very simple user interface.  You choose a brush.  If it is not exactly what you want, a slider goes from 0% to 100% to tweak it.  Less headache and way less price.

When the movie Roger Rabbit came out, the Amiga computer was popular and Eric Daniels, who had animated on Roger, was hired to animate a Roger Rabbit game for the Amiga.  So he could animate in the traditional way, the programmer wrote code for an in-house animation tool.  It allowed Eric to draw extremes and then inbetween them for smooth animation.  As luck would have it, though, the Roger Rabbit game wasn't a big success.  But the programmer sold the animation program to Disney who renamed it The Disney Animation Studio and successfully marketed it.

In the old technology, an animator for film drew on a light table.  If, for example, the animator was drawing a pitcher throwing a baseball, drawing number one would be the beginning of the action with the arm pulled back.  Then with the light on, the animator would lay another sheet of paper over drawing number one and draw number three, which would be the end of the throw where the pitching arm is extended forward.  Then the animator lays a third sheet of paper over the other two and draws the in-between, which is drawing number two.  In this drawing, the arm follows an arc and is positioned somewhere between the beginning pose and the ending pose.  The drawings are out of order (2, 3, 1), so the animator has to take them off the peg bars and put them in the proper order (1, 2, 3) to see it move correctly as they flip it.

The Disney Animation Studio literally transposed that process to the digital world, so you drew number one, then drew number three, and then number two.  If you pressed play, it would be out of order and not move correctly.  To see it move correctly, you had to trade the drawings around from what was onscreen to a buffer and then go back to the buffer to retrieve the drawings in the proper order before you could hit play and see it move correctly.  While it was offscreen and invisible to the naked eye, you could easily lose a drawing if you weren't paying attention.  So the tedious process of the old technology was built into the new technology to keep it cumbersome.

Along comes Deluxe Paint III from Electronic Arts.  They took advantage of the digital technology and before you drew anything, it had a template of image sequence called P and N.  First you drew a frame.  When you added a frame, it made the previous frame P (P for Previous). When you jumped back to the previous frame, the next frame was N (N for Next).  You could jump back and forth between P and N with the left and right arrow keys and see the basic movement. When you were on P, you could add a blank frame by hitting the pluse key.  With the light box on, you could see the Previous frame and the Next frame and in-between it.  Then just hit spacebar and you could see the animation loop.  The drawings never got out of order.  It took advantage of digital reality to make the process of drawn animation easier.

The programs I mentioned in this blog were at the transition from old technology to new technology.  As computers are now a big part of our lives, software designers are creating better user interfaces that make the process of creating art and film easier.  They don't have to build in extra tedious  steps to make the process the chore it used to be.  With some of the newer software, it leaves you freer to let the imagination loose.

Julie Newmar, fresh from the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, (she reunited with Batman co-stars Adam West and Burt Ward to announce the November release of the complete TV series on DVD) will be recording the narration for my documentary  CREATED EQUAL, about how special needs artists see themselves and the world differently than the world sees them.  It is a labor of love for Julie, whose son John has Down's Syndrome.  John just celebrated his 33rd birthday and Julie had a big celebration in his honor.  Gary Strobel shot two hours of footage of the birthday which I edited down to about a minute and a half.

The documentary CREATED EQUAL is in the rough edit stage, just awaiting Julie's voiceover to complete it.