That tank

The importance of Tom's tank has diminished somewhat, but we still love it, so what the hell!

Brand Licensing report

Last week saw us wandering the isles of Brand Licensing, the annual UK exhibition for all things brand-related. This was our first year attending and it proved to be very interesting. We saw this as more of a fact finding mission than anything else, so we spoke to lots of exhibitors and picked their brains about how they brought their brand ‘to market’, as they say!


All very interesting stuff, each seemed to have had a different journey with different methods that worked for them. The overriding message was that TV is not the only route, especially in recent years. We came away buzzing with possibilities and are currently putting tighter a plan of action using some of the stuff we learnt from the show.

It was also a great place for goodies! Gordon met Jacqueline Wilson and Nick Sharratt of Tracy Beaker fame. They were signing copies of their new book (which we got for free) and chatted at length with Gordon about illustration, book publishers, jewellery, vegetarian restaurants and Whitby! They both seemed very down to earth, friendly and unspoilt by their success and fame. I missed out as I was in a seminar about royalty payments! Gordon was good enough to get a signed copy for my daughter who is a big Beaker fan. The signed book made her day!

The show also had more than its fair share of suited characters including Curtis’ Bob the Builder. Some of them were a bit disturbing to say the least! The full sized Dalek on BBC Worldwide’s stand was a popular one.

Eee I ee I yo!

Curtis Jobling has remininded me of one of my favourite Funny Farm comic strips, just wanted to share it with y'all. Take a moment to enjoy Curtis' blog here, especially his trampoline prowess!

A Great Book

Its good to see the influence of 2D animation is still alive and well, as this book proves. I have high hopes for Open Season, its a 3D film that leans heavily on the huge history of 2D animation. This book shows some of that development and is well worth a look. Also I love the fur on the main character, we have had many fur related discussions for our rabbit characters, it would be great to get it looking something like this.

(Shame we don't have a feature film budget to experiment with, but we'll do what we can.)

Roof work

As some of you suggested we are now working on improving the roof of the farm by building individual tiles instead of using a texture map to do the job. This is a work-in-progress.

On top of the World

This image shows the other side of the farmhouse, we've added two bedroom windows onto the roof section.

Sunrise on Tom's Farm

It is a crisp summer’s day in late August. The dew and mist slowly evaporate off the fields at the start of another day on the farm. This image shows the completed farm exterior model; see earlier posts for work-in-progress images. The grass is made using 3DS Max's hair & fur modifier.

Character Profile - Madeline Odd

Madeline is a relatively new addition to the series; she never featured in the original comic strips. As we started to develop the show we quickly realised we needed a new human female character that could interact with Rufus. We toyed with using Flossie but realised that this would mean changing her character quite a lot. So Madeline was born. We took two existing characters from the comic strip, Dr Donald Odd and Madam Madd, and made them into a married couple. As Donald Odd is a Victorian-esq man of science and Madam Madd is a crazy mystic type we thought the clashes of culture would make for an interesting dynamic.
Madeline is basically a mix of her parents which makes her one of the most rounded characters; she has less of the extremes of her parents. She is intelligent, confident and usually knows the best outcome to a situation. She will not force her views on others which can sometimes mean her opinion is not always heard.

Lorie - the rabbit that never was

During our tenure with Nelvana we had a conference call with an American writer whose name escapes me. She had a very good pedigree having worked on numerous animated shows as well as one or two live action comedies like The Cosby Show. During our discussions she suggested introducing a female rabbit called Lorie. To be honest neither Gordon nor I saw much mileage in the idea, but that’s just our opinion. Anyway, I did the quick sketch below to explore the possibilities. She’s a bit mumsy and not very exciting, probably because we weren’t set on fire by the concept. Just thought I'd share this with you, it’s a long time ago now and Lorie doesn't feature in our plans now. Onward and upwards eh!
Also worth mentioning, in a blatent attempt to get the number of comments up, its my birthday on Sunday! 23 already! Let the jokes commence.

Summer Magic

It’s been a busy few weeks. We haven’t posted much but there has been a lot going on. We appointed animation consultants Red & Blue Productions to help us bring the Farm to market. They have already provided some much needed advice. We had a meeting with them in London during the middle of the heat wave a couple of weeks ago. What we realised was that we have got something worthwhile but we needed to refine it in certain areas. There were questions about the tank to resolve, the age of Rufus, who the main characters were, even the name of the project has come under much scrutiny. (So don’t be surprised if the name changes!)

Since then we’ve had many discussions and we believe we’ve managed to address all the issues and make the project into a more coherent entity too. We’ve now got to do some rewriting on our pitch material and come up with a new script.

I had a week in Northumberland on holiday with my family. As we spent a few nights on a Farm and lots of time exploring castles, woods and gardens I’ve had lots of inspiration for the Farm! On one particular day we go caught in a heavy rain storm while we were in a thick forest. The rain hardly got through the tree canopy and it made everything really quite magical. This is me camping it up on the edge of the covering.
It really was a good day for thinking and I hope the new ideas will feed back into the show. I really like this next pic as it reminds me of a Totoro style landscape of tree-tunnels! We defiantly need to get some of this magical feeling into our farm.
This week we’ve had meetings about funding and we are hopeful that by the end of the year we might have our first animation tests of our main characters. I’ll let you know how this goes over the next few weeks.

Ding Dong the Bells are Ringing!

Sorry for the extreme lack of posts recently, Niel and myself have been very busy with Farm related work and our own illustration and animation jobs. (That's our excuse anyway!) As a reward, or punishment, for the huge gap in posts, I managed to locate one of my missing Farm paintings. I'm afraid that this is a scan of a pretty duff colour photocopy so apologies for the quality. For obvious reasons, Niel has the original as this was a wedding present for himself and his lovely wife Diane. Since this was done, Niel's hair seems to have slipped off his head and ended up on his chin.......surreal!

Ciaranator 9000 - Glazy Strikes Back

That mischevious modeller Andrew Glazebrook has been at it again! He's taken one of the concept drawings from here and built it as a 3D model. Thanks Glazy, we think it looks great! Andrew has this posted on his blog:

Here's a quick 3D model I made based on Niel Bushnell's concept that he posted over on his Mad Tom's Farm blog. The model took around 75 mins but the render took 3 hours at 1024 x 768 in Vue, I did have it on the superior setting though. I've worked with Ciaran who this fridge is named after, and it bares little resemblance to him...for one thing Ciaran has a beard.

Gerard is building this here too - he started it a few weeks ago but we had to put him onto another project pretty quickly. His model has a few more details on it as I'd given him a lot of reference pictures that Glazy hasn't seen, including these:

When Ged is free to complete the fridge I'll post the results here.

In The Mix

We've both tried to think of the influences on us when we came up with the main concepts for Mad Tom's Farm. Here are the results, (inspired by SFX magazines charts), although Gordon protests loudly about the Darling Buds of May!
The biggest two influences were Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield, not surprising considering it was a newspaper comic strip first and foremost. We were both big comic fans anyway, reading mostly UK comics like 2000AD. I'm still a fan of black & white artwork, there is a simple honesty to the the work that is lost is photoshop coloured comics.
The other infulences were from some of the shows we both enjoyed at the time, namely comedy and sci-fi! The Farm has a bit of each of these shows as well a being peppered with my other influences along the way that have either been unconcious or forgotton with time!

Character Profile - Tom

I can't believe we've not done a proper 'character profile' for Tom yet! So to correct the oversight here is all you need to know about Tom.

Tom's not the sharpest knife in the draw, not by a long way, in fact he's not even in the draw! If he was in the draw it would be full of sheep and all the other knives would soon be blunt and living in tents. The draw itself would probably go a bit soggy underneath and no doubt all sorts of mushrooms and fungi would begin to grow on it. Shall I go on?

Tom was the first character we came up with and to be honest he was pretty two-dimensional to begin with, no pun intended. We wanted a typical country bumpkin sort who would be good for laughs and probably not much more. Over time Tom has, like all our characters, evolved. (He couldn't stay as simple forever now could he!)

Yes, he's still pretty stupid but what he knows about is the Farm and he knows it bloody well! The farm has been in his family since the dawn of farming and its traditions and methods, (unorthodox as they are), have been honed and passed down through the generations. He may give the outward appearance of just bumbling along but he knows stuff! Lots of stuff! Tom knows all the secrets of the farm, he a one-man confessional booth. Tom isn't judgemental, has no emotional baggage, no issues to resolve and no axe to grind, so he's the perfect person to work through your problems with. (Like all the best Psychiatrists he'll just throw your questions right back at you!)

He's also perfectly in tune with his surroundings, knowing when it’s going to rain, when to harvest and when to dance nude under the full moon! Tom is a classic family man, he loves to spend time with Bernie and little Flossie who can do no wrong in her fathers eye. The only time you would see Tom angry or raise his voice is in defence of his family and his farm.

Gordon posted some of the first Tom sketches in an earlier post but here are his first and last appearances to compare how his look developed over time.

Stand by!

Gordon is receiving a message from the Mother Ship!


Sorry Gordon, I couldn't resist!

ITB: The End of the Beginning.......

Well dear readers, these are the last two sheets of the earliest sketches that I could find. This first set is of some of my pencils of Bernard, Tom's HUMUNGOUS wife and all round lovely cook type woman.

At this stage, she was almost complete, I think the only major change we made was to enlarge and round off her bottom jaw line.

The main illo has a tiny homage to the Hellraiser films, an assortment of butchering knives hanging from her belt. I've always had a problem with the characters eating their friends(ie, cows, pigs and sheep etc!) I doubt we'd do that in the animation.

Another crazy thing I've just noticed is that Bernie has currant eyes (the bane of all greetings cards illustrators fact fans!) Her and Flossie were the only ones with eyes like this, whereas the rest of them have the classic, whites around their pupils. Mad eh?



This is it then, the last one! One last set of Tom's (funny how we concentated so much on Tom, but hardly anything else on the others!) Like the Bernie illo's above, we'd almost got him ready for the outside world, all he needed was a tiny bit more refinement and off he goe's!

Quite a few sheep illos on here as well, I like sheep...sheep are funny and soooo easy to draw. One of my all time favourite strips was of the sheep being sheared and then getting their wool knitted into wooly jumpers which they had to wear! All very silly!

ITB: Episode IV: The Phantom Thomas

Here's the last set of Niel's character concept designs. Another selection of various Tom's (a herd of Tom's perhaps?) Again, you can see the basic's of the final Tom starting to show, espcially on the bottom few designs. I'm not to sure about the full length sketch, he kinda looks a bit creepy in a 'D'ya wanna see my puppies' type of way!
Yet some more portraits, I never knew Niel had done so many! These are some of my favourites of his, the geezer look's mad as!

This one's interesting. We have what I believe to be Niel's first ideas for Bernard and the fabled 'Nurse'. Bernie seem's a bit too fat and her hair's mental but you can get the basic idea about where we were heading with her. The right hand image of her still crack's me up, she doesn't appear to have any torso area, just a head, chest and to stumpy legs! To say that Nurse is slighty different to the yet unborn Flossie is an understatement!Special mention must also go to Niel's awesomely feeble attempt at getting into Uncle George Lucas' good books with his Darth illo....'Rufus.....I am your farmer!'

ITB: Episode III: Return of the Farmer

Here's Niels last early Rufus design (that I can find anyway!) At this point we'd pretty much got Rufus nailed, as I mentioned yesterday, we still had to compress him a bit and make him a tad more cartoony but all the core ingredients are here!

I've got a couple of piggy images on here as well, I've got a feeling that the one on the left of Rufus was actually used in the first handful of strips.

This next set is of some basic Rufus poses. I'm not sure who the middle top face is meant to be, but whoever he is, he's got a cracking ear....IT'S GINORMOUS! I also love Niel's version of Wallace (top left)....ooohhh I really fancy a nice bit of cheese lad!

Here's some more Tom design's that I was playing around with. We really liked the idea of what Tom's hair would be like under his seemingly nailed on hat. As the whole theme of the Farm is madness, I like the idea of some type of insane hair that couldn't possibly fit inside the hat but once revealed, would spring out and have a sort of 'rooster' quaility. I seem to remember that we did a small handful of strips with Tom minus his hat but we eventually toned down his hair. As the ol'saying goes....Hair today.....gone tommorrow! (Thanks to Mr Bling for inspiring me to fill this blog with as many crap jokes as possible! This sheet also has the very first drawing of Rufus' Russian hat, which like tanks, I'm obsessed with! RUSSIAN HATS RULE!

ITB: Episode II: The Rufi Strike Back

This next lot concentrate on designing Rufus. These were all done by Niel apart from the crappy one of Rufus looking angry! Again, like yesterdays blog, you can see how Rufus is starting to take shape. I've just noticed that Niel gave Rufus an earring on a few of his sketches, very cool but we must have dropped this as well to make him appear more younger.

The full length body sketches are pretty funny. Niel, being the perfectionist that he is, started by making Rufus more 'human' size. In practice this is great, but for a three panel strip which will be printed to a very small size, it could have caused problems. A lot of the secondry characters are animals which talk and are naturally smaller in height than your average geezer so we had to squash Ruf down to fit him into the frame (and also have room for the text bubbles)

I keep seeing my handwriting all over the place with the words 'my farm' this was a lame attempt to have the Farm actually called 'Myfarm' so we could crow bar the 'hilarious' joke into the strip.....I still don't get it!

In the beginning.......

I finally found the very first rough drafts for Mad Tom's Farm, previously known as The Funny Farm. I'll put them up over the next few days as there's quite a few of the little blighters!

There are notes dotted on them all over the place and at first I was tempted to Photoshop them out but upon thinking about it (over a nice glass of Merlot 1869 and smoking my pipe) I decided to leave them in as a testomany to how close the strip nearly turned into a more adult aimed comic then what it finally morphed into!

You'll notice the names GOF and NIB here and there, GOF was my 'cartoonist' name (which I still use to this day but altered to Goth or Gothtwinz) and Niel's was NIB. You'll also see 'Picturebox' on most of the examples. This was the name of our former business (it was Niel's really....but that's a story for a long winters night dear readers) which Niel and I ran for a year or so, producing amongest The Farm, the Daily Sport's strip 'Flasher Mac' spot cartoons for the Sun and the Star, our baby, the comic 'Over the Edge' and various other arty related shenanigans.

If you can read my coffee induced scribblings, you'll see that the core characters were basically set up (but NO rabbits) the only major difference is the role of the daughter. Our first idea was to have her as a sex interest for Rufus (at one point she was a milk maid!) she was to be named Nurse (which I think we 'borrowed' from the nursey character in BlackadderII) We soon realized that the Farm should be for a wider audiance and so any 'adult' references were dropped and eventually, Nurse became Flossie, our much loved mini version of Bernard, her mother, with a taste for violence and revenge!

The funny thing that I noticed but never thought about before, is that above the name of Rufus are two characters a dog and a cat (called Dog and Cat....we must have been tired) These two never made it after our intial brainstorming session but instead, over time, were replaced by Dalton and then Cool Bob.

There's some of Niel's first designs for Tom, including his straw hat and bit of grass hanging from his mouth and my first page of very rough roughs mainly of Tom and Rufus. The geezer shouting 'DIE' must have been me venting my anger after a hard day at the office! There's about 2 or 3 of the Tom drawings where you can really see the beginnings of the soon to be fully designed character.