Cravenomena

On the day of the dinosaur attack, I scanned the skies nervously. The forecast was for scattered showers, and already it had sprinkled a few times that morning.  There was also a capricious wind brewing, and I knew that would play hell with my makeshift bluescreens. I was standing in the parking lot of the Dinosaur Journey Museum in Fruita, waiting for my small crew and cast to arrive for the shooting of a commercial to promote the annual "Dinosaur Days" festival.  I had ... Read More

Fifty. When you're counting pennies in your change jar, that's not a very big number.  But when you're Craven, fixed and quivering like a fly in agar as the big five-oh barrels down upon him from the realm of What-Was-Once-Distant-Old-Age, it seems impossibly large. Perhaps it would be closer to our experiential reality to measure our lives in seconds -- in which case, my age is around 1,539,529,440 as I write these words.  It is surely true there are moments nowadays that I feel ... Read More

One of the more challenging concepts I ever had to animate came when I was hired on a freelance basis to produce a spot for Unifirst Mortgage in Grand Junction, Colorado. For a number of years, Unifirst had been using a cute yellow duck in their advertising -- internally, they called him "Howard," unaware, I think, of Howard the Duck, a Marvel Comics character created in 1973 by the late, lamented Steve Gerber -- before Unifirst president Ken Rabideau approached me ... Read More

Here's another commercial Craven produced during his tenure as a staff producer for KKCO-TV, Grand Junction's local NBC affiliate. While not perfect, there is much which tickles Craven in this spot. The assignment was to produce a 30-second commercial which would promote KKCO's in-house production department and the station's advertising efficacy. I think it was my idea to create a STAR TREK pastiche, which led to delightfully ridiculous notions like a space-going retail store and alien "paying customers." The spot required more ... Read More

Here's another spot Craven wrote, directed, produced and animated for the Cabaret Dinner Theatre in Grand Junction, Colorado. My local readers know the Cabaret closed its doors this year, after a decade as the Grand Valley's primary theatrical outlet. During most of that time, it was up to Craven to produce all of their television commercials, and here's one he did for their first production of ALWAYS... PATSY CLINE. The Cabaret commercials often posed interesting production challenges, and this spot was ... Read More

One of my goals for this blog was to create a space where I can display some of my work as a filmmaker and animator, as well as discuss techniques and reminisce about past projects. In upcoming weeks, I will be writing about the making of SHOCK! SHOCK! SHOCK!, the strange, low-budget feature I co-wrote and -directed with Todd Rutt about 20 years ago, as well as "Fun For Men!" the live-action/animated short I created a decade later. For the past eight ... Read More