New Location for Episode

Easter Island mother f$#*er, I'ma mess those suckas up!

Brainstorming Session

John and I got together last week and had a brainstorming session for LTH, and discussed what times/places/events we might like to visit in the series. We also came up with a few ancestors of John's we'd like to meet. Here's my rough notes from that session:

• Mexican episode (Aztecs, Zapata, Pancho Villa)
• Production Company name
• Include dog walking nutbag
• William Wallace relative
• Torvald Williams (Heavy metal guitarist for Bad Deth, 1970s LA?)
• Civil War or Reconstruction ("what's this I hear bout you whippin' slaves?")
• Beethoven
• Inventions (clock, cotton gin, Wright Bros, pasta)
• Robin Hood
• Ali Baba
• Caveman (w/subtitles)
• Vikings
• Columbus
• 1930s gangster
• Custer vs Indians
• Gold Rush
• Golden Spike
• NApoleon
• Genghis Khan
• Silk Road
• Crusades
• Pirates

Cool project to be inspired by

Here's a very cool animation project where they make a Hollywood action movie style movie using various company's logotypes. Love the look of the whole thing.

They seem to use a method I was thinking about using for LTH, namely acting out the scenes to be animated and then rotoscoping in the features.

Time to open the door...

This will be a blog following (from almost the very beginning) the evolution of what we hope to be an online animated series starring John Loftin, directed by Ted Hobgood, and written by a combination of the both of them. The story will follow a twenty-something guy traveling through history while trying to find his way back home. Yeah, it's been done before, but we hope to put our own mark on it and make it fun.

I (Ted) was originally inspired by a promo for "The Life and Times of Tim", when the show was commissioned to do pieces for Virgin Airlines. The limited animation style looked like something I could actually accomplish (I've only done a tiny bit of animation in my time), and something about the shot of Richard Branson in a sombrero on an airline made me think about how cool it would be to show a guy completely out of his element. I soon came up with the idea of having a real chill guy stuck in the past, just taking in his surroundings and not really phased by it all, just dealing with whatever came along. In my mind, there was only one person for the job: John Loftin. Fortunately, John was excited about the idea, and here we go!

We'll be using this blog as a sort of repository for ideas and links to the projects of others we admire, tutorials, and other sources for information and inspiration. And who knows, when we actually get the final project out there, maybe somebody out there will dig reading this and seeing where we came from.

Enjoy.

Ted Hobgood

Chapel Hill, NC

9/16/09