Monday, October 19, 2009

Uncle Jeffy Sketchbook v. 1.0

Preamble Ramble:
Pardon me, dear gentle readers, for the frequency lapses over the last 10 days so of my humble blog. There have been a few days past with no new post.

This has bothered me, surely more than it has affected your daily lives, but the main point of my beginning this rambling was to force myself into picking up and using my satchel of creative tools. If nothing else to see what may evolve out of the daily effort. There are several other reasons too, which I'll get into another time.

Not to mention that this thing is called "Inside Jeff Overturf's Head". If there's no post, doesn't this imply that there's nothing in there? That's just a sign of a lot of bad things.

Over the course of the first few months of my doing this, I was pleased to see how easily I could produce content day to day. I guess over that time my subconscious began to shovel it into a particular direction, and now as I come up with things to say I find myself deciding that those things don't fit the parameters of this blog.

Poppycock! is my reaction to that thought. This is WHATEVER may be passing through...if the shine isn't on the pear yet, it's still probably good enough to eat.

Today I bring you the first view into what I'll call "Uncle Jeffy's Sketchbook". That's ideas I am playing with, that haven't reached full fruition yet.

It will be nice for me to have a record of how my ideas develop, and I hope still fun for you to see. I guess I've already done this type of post before, as can be witnessed by the post found here.

Also, don't let the term "Sketchbook" throw you. Some will be sketches drawn, others will take other forms. That's what multi-media's all about.

Now, on with the post:

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in my living room (minding my own business as I always do) and watching a few old movie serials. I was deeply immersed in the rollicking exploits of Flash Gordon or Captain Marvel or Dick Tracy or Tailspin Tommy or whoever, and Frank "The Douche" Terando was perched next to me pretending to watch, but mainly just chirping on about shit he didn't know anything about and annoying me.

At some point he made a semi-coherent, partially-relevant statement (a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters will eventually type all the works of Shakespeare). He mentioned that it would be fun to make our own version of one of these Saturday matinee staples of the 1930's-1950's. He then jabbered on about some nonsense or other (the monkeys don't type MacBeth all at once you know, there's allot of "afhdoiagh" and "vdaiqthqho" in between the real words) and I went to the drawing board.

See below my concept sketch of "The Douche"-named characters, Congo Jeffy and Action Frank.


Further discussion went out the window as I got to my "Douche" saturation point and had to start drinking to dull the sound of his chirping (I think the primates in the aforementioned analogy might have been howler monkeys), and no further work was made on this idea.

Frank's (you know..."The Douche"?) concept wasn't to actually film it or to draw it out, but to take still pictures of us and photo shop the bejesus out of them to create our jungle-science fiction-fantasy-western-adventure story. He then promised to bring over the above pictured hats so we could try them on.

Two years or so passed (monkey's get distracted you know...there were female howler monkeys to draw his attention and I'm sure there was more than one "poo-flinging" altercation that was gotten into) and he finally brought them over last weekend.

Surprise, the fez actually fit my ginormous head.

Seeing as my roommate Mike was now back in the picture, "The Douche" ("Le Douche" in proper society, "Oook-OOk-grAWK!" in howler monkey talk) brought by a hat for him to.

The following video of this fine brain-trust even captures us coming up with Mike's character name. Like catching lightning it's preserved digitally for all time. It even closes with proof that maybe this should have some old 3-D movie elements attached.



There you have it. The earliest stages in the first adventures of Congo Jeffy, Action Frank and "Ace" Hole.

Did you like my keen "Copter-Fez" effect?

1 comment:

Marco said...

You know, I really thought I had seen it all. There is something vaguely unsettling with you wearing a fez.

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