Wait, is this Part III, or Part IV? I’m already losing count.

Anyway, this video helps to explain the third tab in StepRep, the one marked “Referrals and Quotes”. These functions are still a couple months away, but the video should give you a pretty good idea where the product is headed.

It has come to my attention that the single most popular post on this blog was one I made just before Christmas titled Monster evolution.

I couldn’t figure out why, until I tried Googling the phrase, and discovered that there’s a stylish and addictive Flash game by that title. It seems that most of these visitors are more interested in the game than they are in our silly promotional cartoons.

I suppose the polite thing to do would be to go back and change the unintentionally deceptive title of that post. Instead I’m going to exploit the coincidence and use it to draw still more attention to our silly promotional cartoons. Also, I promised to post more of my monster concept sketches but I never got around to it.

By the way, just because I’m posting these pictures, don’t think I’ve deluded myself into believing I know how to draw.

Cagey Camel

(Cagey Camel is the code name VendAsta’s developers used for the second iteration of StepRep. I pictured Cagey as a surly tough in a leather jacket, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.)

Bartleby the Scrivener

(Obviously Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener isn’t a monster. But I identify with his lazy stubbornness, which is probably why I decided to put him into the cartoon. He looks a little like me.)

We’ve been winding up for the official release of StepRep and it’s been hectic around here. I pass by guys crying in the corridors all the time. And right at the peak of the hecticness, Brendan and Jeff – our CEO and main marketing guy, respectively – have buzzed off to the annual Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. Well, they say they’re at the conference. More likely they just going to Broadway shows and taking long hansom cab rides around Central Park.

I hope Brendan and Jeff are meeting lots of interesting people and having a good time in the States. It should be a little warmer there anyway.

Meanwhile, StepRep Beta is now live. You should try it out. It’s pretty shiny, and getting shinier every day as the techies hunt down and exterminate the remaining bugs. And it looks swank, thanks to the design work of my office buddies Marie-Louise and John (left).

But don’t worry, the monsters are still there to ugly things up a little.

So the third Spokesmonster cartoon is finished. Finally. After seven weeks.

By way of comparison, the previous cartoon took me about three weeks to create. Although the running time is only a little longer, the new cartoon – measured in terms of file size – is almost three times as complex. My working file for the second cartoon was 35 megabytes; the new cartoon came in a little under 90. (Garson Hampfield, which is almost seven minutes long, took up only 43 megs.)

MyFrontSteps house exterior

There’s a lot of little pieces in there. For example, this drawing of a house took me over an hour. In the cartoon, the house flashes by in about five seconds. It’s pretty small to begin with, and by the time it gets shrunk still further and compressed by YouTube, virtually all the detail is lost.

In addition to the house there are drawings of a kitchen, a bathroom, and three views of a living room. Each drawing is onscreen for only a couple seconds. Each took about an hour. So that’s almost a day of work right there.

What I’m saying is, I’m an idiot.

But apart from spending an inordinate amount of time on tiny details, the main reason the new cartoon took so long is that for the first three weeks I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. Flailing around for a direction, I spent most of my time drawing monsters.

Since I’m between animations, back in flailing mode, I thought over the next few days I’d post some sketches showing how these monsters evolved, starting with…

The Reichschancellor

Frenchy the Bartender

I’ve got a funny job. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing nothing but drawing cartoon monsters. I’ve spent entire days with my feet up on my desk, pad and paper in my lap, doodling snail ladies and lizard rappers. For the longest time I had no idea where this was taking me. Maybe I was using the doodling as an excuse to avoid doing more productive work. But all these monsters will be going into the next Spokesmonster video, so I figure I haven’t been totally wasting my time.

I just did a tally of my completed monsters. I’m up to eighteen now. (Many of these are just drawings that will be flashed onscreen for a moment or two, but some of them have been broken down for limb movements and facial expressions.) Here’s the thing: I’d like there to be roughly as many girl monsters as there are boy monsters. But I’m already out of whack. I’ve got twelve boy monsters, only six girl monsters.

Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.

Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of the Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.

But I wonder if the gender disparity doesn’t derive from something more fundamental. Look at the design of the male and female icons on bathroom doors. The male icon is a simple stick figure. The female icon is a stick figure with a dress. Boiled down to their most basic forms, the woman requires more lines to draw than the man.

I’ve noticed in my own drawing that it takes longer to design a female character than it does a male character. With a girl monster I have to worry about hips and boobs and hair and making sure the facial features look feminine – I don’t mean attractive, I just mean that you want your girl monster to actually look like a girl. The cheap way to do this is to give her lipstick and long eyelashes. Or you can be a bit more subtle in the shaping of the jaw and the placement of the eyes, so that makeup is unnecessary. Either way, it takes a little extra work. And I’m a fundamentally lazy guy.

With a boy monster, you just hack out your basic human figure and you’re done – it’s a boy.

For some reason, by default, cartoons come out male.

Why is this? Obviously, there’s a long and complicated history behind the iconography of maleness and femaleness, and much of that history occurred back when women weren’t in a position to complain about what the men were painting on bathroom doors. But those bathroom icons reflect something other than centuries of sexism. Maybe stick figures are assumed to be male for a reason: the basic male shape really is composed of simple straight lines, while the basic female shape is made up of more complicated curves. Maybe it’s not just sexism that skews my monsters male by a ratio of two to one, but physiology.

If my speculation is correct, the pro-male bias appears at the very earliest stage of the creative process – the stage where the cartoonist, chair leaned back, feet on desk, idly doodles on a scratchpad. If every doodle starts as a male, then of course the cartoonist will wind up with a gallery of male characters.

Maybe I’m making an assumption, though. When women doodle, do their doodles come out female?

Babywearing?

A co-worker emailed me a link to this article about the Motrin “babywearing” controversy. (And here’s the ad that touched it all off.) I guess Motrin has erred in the same way we did with our first cartoon a few months back – by underestimating the touchiness of the ad-watching public.

I have no advice for Motrin or for parents who wish to wear their babies. But I, and the Spokesmonster, feel their pain.

I’ve been animating the Spokesmonster non-stop for the last two months. After the first cartoon was released, just when I would have liked to take a break, it immediately became urgent (as I described in previous posts) to begin work on the follow-up.

But now that the second cartoon is complete, I can take a bit of a breather and think about what comes next. Our next project here at MyFrontSteps is an application aimed less at the business crowd and more at average folks – homeowners and renters. This new application will allow people to showcase their homes to their friends, their neighbours, and the whole wide world.

Is the Spokesmonster the right character to introduce this new application? Hard to say. One possibility we’ve discussed is that we might retain the Spokesmonster but introduce another character (or characters) to help shoulder promotional duties. And since I already had in mind a friend’s suggestion that the Spokesmonster needed a girlfriend…

Spokesmonstress concept sketches

Spokesmonstress concept drawings

Maybe someday the Spokesmonster universe will be as crowded as Ronald McDonaldland.