Half Way to Brazil!

Well, not quite. We don’t arrive in country until June 14th. In the meantime we’re travelling the eastern and southern US to visit friends and family. To all the kind folks we have come to know and meet in Dallas over the last two years, if we didn’t get a chance to say good bye, well, good bye. It has been a real pleasure working with you, knowing you and being a part of your life.

We had a great visit with some old friends from my Big Idea days in Nashville. Good buddy Tim Hodge (and his kind wife Sandy and their whole family) graciously housed our family for a couple of days. We got to see some of the nice folks I’ve missed for the last few years since Big Idea went bankrupt and was reborn in ownership of Classic Media, Inc. Tom Bancroft was so kind as to give me a copy of his excellent book Creating Characters With Personality. Great book on character design. You should go get a copy. Really. Like now. Tom knows his stuff and he has the resume’ to prove it. He and his biz partner Rob Corely are doing a brisk business at their Funnypages Productions in Nashville. It was good to see other folks like Mike Nawrocki, Kurt Heineke, Chuck Vollmer, John Trauscht, Andy Youssi, Joe Spadaford, Paul Conrad, Greg Hardin, Steve Fuller and others. I hadn’t seen them since the dark days of layoffs and it was great to have new memories to add to the mix.

I also got a chance to isit an old friend from elementary school that I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. Turns out my old school chum John Hamm is working as an animator in Nashville at a fun little studio called Magnetic Dreams. I got a chance to catch up with John and meet some of the really nice people over at MD. They’re doing some really fun work for Sesame Street. There’s good animation all over the place in Nashville. Who knew??
Then it was time to see my mom and brother for a bit, but that time has passed as well. So we’re back on the road to our next stop. We’re homeless, possessionless (save for 9 suitcases and some carry on baggage- we gave the rest away) and car-less. We’ve rented a minivan to lug all our baggage with us as we make our way from Dallas to Nashville to Knoxville to Rochester NY to Buffalo and then on to Cuiaba, Brazil. For those of you who are VTS subscribers, I will most likely have June’s video done sometime before we leave for Brazil next Tuesday. The challenge has been finding the time to edit the thing and upload it. I grossly underestimaneted the amount of work it would take to get all our stuff taken care of to get ready to leave. Oh well. Lesson learned. Thanks for the patience.

Reporting from the road somewhere outside of Roanoke, Virginia, til next time….