Developing

At HoC, anyone can present ideas to be developed for film, television or a short. We want to stockpile as many properties as possible so that we are always ready to pitch when we see an opportunity. The process always starts with a seed idea. This idea is often accompanied by a phrase like "it would be cool if" or "that's ridiculous, nobody will buy that". Next is a treatment. A treatment is basically a script without the dialogue. If the idea is still interesting at this point, we will start producing artwork. I'm a big fan of artwork that is as new and original as possible. If the idea is still compelling, we produce a bible and write a script. At this point it is time to call the agent and prepare to pitch to studios.

Shorty McShorts' Shorts

For those of you who have access to the Disney Channel, stick around after "That's So Raven" on Friday, July 28 at 7:55pm for a five minute short film. You will see the Shorty McShorts' Shorts show. This is a showcase of new original animated shorts by some very talented creators. Disney will be airing a new short every week and you will get to vote online for the ones that you like.

The Disney shorts program has been aggressively searching for creators who truly have cool new projects and a certain Canadian studio who's name starts with 'house' and ends with 'cool' just might, maybe, kind of have something cooking that possibly, perhaps may appear on said channel. Shhhhh, it's on the down low. We'll update soon.

Thanks to Ghostbot for the cool Shorty McShort design.

Breaking Even

House of Cool's own Cal Brunker directed an animated music video currently
airing on Much More Music (The Canadian MTV) and is a runnner up for the
top 10. Please go and cast your vote at:

www.muchmoremusic.com/top10
The song is Rob Szabo - Breaking Even

You can watch the video at the link below, or search Youtube for Breaking
Even.
http://www.calbrunker.com/Work/Work.html

Update:
Thanks to everyone who voted, Breaking Even was #10 in the countdown.

Credo

Another Robin Joseph illustration of The Dreaming.

Here is a comment from DanO that I thought I would share with everyone.

"well...
I would invite you to move to Los Angeles and witness yourself the multitudes of disgusting opportunists who routinely prey upon more creative people for ideas they can steal.

if it happened to you once, you could shake it off, but the second time you'd set aside the one "thousand more ideas" credo. its easy to say we all have many ideas because we do, but when you spend your money, sweat, time, and blood devloping an idea, you'll undertsand the sting of having it appropriated to someone else's project."

My reply:

well...DanO
I've spent many years in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Ottawa and New York working at many of the feature and television studios that harbor the multitudes of disgusting opportunists you are talking about. For my entire career I've freely let anyone listen to any concept I had. I have also spent innumerable hours and tens of thousands of dollars developing properties so I can confidently say that I practice what I preach.

Evidently you have had poor experiences when it comes to intellectual properties but I stay true to my credo. No matter how many vultures there are out there it does not out weight the benefits of a disciplined development program and positive exposure.

Tardy

I've been tardy with the blog lately. I apologize but my life has been incredibly busy as of late.
To make it up, here are two blogs in a row.

HoC is a preproduction studio. We have made a couple of short films but most of our work is in storyboarding and design. However, this work does not define who we are as a studio. It is the original ideas that we develop in-house that most represents what HoC is all about. Unfortunately, original ideas by themselves do not pay the bills. But if we are smart and take a long term view on the projects we develop, I believe that we will come out on top in the end.

We don't develop ideas based on what is popular or hip at the moment (that's lame), but I do spend a lot of time observing what is popular and hip. I do this so that I don't miss an opportunity to pitch one of our projects that we developed earlier if it happens to fit the mold.

Creative Rant

Artwork from our Vista project.

One of the problems that I have with people who want to produce their own properties is that they fall in love with every idea. I'm not saying that you shouldn't really like the ideas you come up with, but when you become so attached to your ideas you fail to grow as an artist. An example of this are people who sue major studios like Pixar and Blue Sky for stealing their ideas. I'm sure you've seen these cases before. "I'm going to sue because I came up with a story about a clown fish and no one else could be as creative as me". Or "I invented a one eyed green monster, and there is no possible way that an entire studio full of creative artists doing a film about monsters, could come up with a similar idea". Or "If I mix two rodents (a squirrel and a rat) and call it a 'Scrat', I own that idea forever". This type of thinking says to me that you are not a creative person at all. You are just a person with a single good idea, and are so diluted by your perception of your own creativity, that you cannot believe that anyone in this world of six billion people could have an idea similar to your own.

I believe that if you steal an idea from me you could not possibly do as good of a job with it as I could. Furthermore, you know that place where that idea came from? Well, there are a thousand more where that one came from. So I will never cry over a lost idea. I my opinion, the more you are willing to throw away good ideas, the more you are exercising your ability to create new and better ones. With that said, if you do steal an idea from us, we will hunt you down!