“I Want Your Money” Opens Today

Today is “opening day” for the movie “I Want Your Money“, a conservative film by filmmaker Ray Griggs for which I did a bunch of artwork including the caricature of Obama for the above movie poster, character designs for the animated sequences as well as storyboard for those segments.

This movie is getting quite a bit of press. The Lovely Anna called me this morning (I’m in Ohio for the OSU Festival of Cartoon Art”) to say there was a feature about the film on the Today Show this morning that was mostly clips of the animation using my character designs. I’ve also gotten a number of calls and e-mails from friends telling me they saw the trailer or the poster at a theater. Politically this is a pretty charged film, although I have not actually seen it to say just how charged, so predictably it’s being praised by the right and maligned by the left, but it’s getting attention either way. I might not agree with Ray’s political ideals but he is a very nice and hard working guy, so I hope the film does very well for him. You can find where it might be playing near you here.

The animation segments are being roasted on CartoonBrew, the animation blog… and rightly so considering the audience there. The short animated segments were never meant to be “feature quality” and shouldn’t even be in the conversation at a place like CartoonBrew. The animation is rough and low budget, and the “big head-little body” character designs aren’t very well suited for animation but that’s the look that Ray wanted. I was hired to do turn around caricature designs specifically in a big head-little body/bobblehead proportion of a number of politicians, and to storyboard out the sequences. That was where my involvement in the animation process stopped. I’ve got no experience at all in animation, which I explained to Ray, but he wanted me to do the work so I delivered exactly what he and the animators asked me for.

In Ray’s defense, the original animation team dropped the ball having never delivered anything past some rough 3D designs until way past several deadlines leaving him in the lurch. Eventually a company called SO Animation did the work with very little time and a very small budget, with the results you see… awkward movement, no shadows from the characters cast in the environment, terrible mouth syncing, weirdly glowing inner mouths. Under the circumstances the animated segments turned out as good as they could have… it is what it is.

Anyway best of luck to Ray and congratulations on the attention his film is getting. I wish him great success with it.