A Gran Red Carpet Premiere

Last weekend, I participated in a super fun event to celebrate the release of Season 3 of Dawn of the Croods on Netflix. Starting last year, I have had the immense honor of working on this hilarious show! The event was held at the comic/coffee shop The Perky Nerd in Burbank, and included a live table read of one of our scripts by our illustrious voice cast...as well as a live drawing demo done by yours truly and some of my insanely talented fellow crew members! All of them are so inspiring, to be able to take part in this celebration alongside them for the first show that I've worked on as a Storyboard Revisionist, was such a special moment for me!!

For my portion of the drawing demo, I chose to draw my absolute favorite Crood - the sassy and self-assured Gran! I was thinking, if there were a big fancy Hollywood red carpet premiere for Dawn of the Croods, what (or who) would Gran wear?! The answer that I came up with was this elegant gown made from the fur of a Bear Owl...but no need to worry pre-historic PETA, no Bear Owls were harmed in the making of this dress (I'm pretty sure). To tie the look all together, Gran is also rocking a broach lent to her by my other favorite Croods character, Amber. That's right, that broach is actually Amber's eye patch...but Gran promised to return it as soon as the premiere is over. "Amber need that back!"

Once my drawing demo was done, I was able to meet Laraine Newman, the voice of both Gran AND Amber (that's right, she voices my two favorite characters)! She was one of the original cast members on Saturday Night Live, and has had a legendary career in comedy ever since. She was incredibly nice, and was sweet enough to sign my drawing of Gran!

Our drawing demos were streamed on Facebook Live, but it can be played back below. Unfortunately there were some technical glitches, so the video cuts out at around 12:00 and then comes back on at around 22:30. What can you do, that's live TV...er, Facebook for ya!

And you can see the table read with Laraine Newman and the other fantastic cast memebers below. They're being led by our incomparable Executive Producer, Brendan Hay.

Gaga's Hell Piano

A few weeks ago, my awesome friend Tinah Lai introduced me to the world of the NASA Datanauts. It's an amazing program that NASA is doing right now, to encourage girls to explore the data science frontier through classes, fellowships and apps. Tinah got a group of friends together to show us how to put together a keyboard using some foam core, circuit boards and a mobile app. When you connect it to your smart phone via Bluetooth, you can push the keys and sound FX will play on your phone. I'm talking sound FX...from space!! Everyone assured me that the sound FX were from NASA's vast archives, but I'm pretty sure that we made contact with extraterrestrial beings and now they're super excited to come to Earth and hang out with us.

We also got to decorate our keyboards, and mine of course ended up featuring one of my Post Modern Muses. And who better to communicate with space via keyboard than Lady Gaga?? I'm calling the device Gaga's Hell Piano

It's directly inspired by her extraordinary performance of "Paparazzi" on Saturday Night Live way back in 2009. With its fierce scarlet lighting, flames in the foreground, and Gaga and her backup dancers' red leather ensembles...I'm pretty sure this performance metaphorically takes place in hell. I have my theories about what this all means symbolically, but I'll spare you all from a 400+ paged dissertation.