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I've been a working writer-for-hire for the last 8 or 9 years, occasionally jumping on the occasional project as a director or story supervisor - usually animated stuff. In college while studying for the ministry, I set up an animation desk in my house-dorm kitchen and spent a year training myself in animation. I was already a halfway decent artist. I was never a great animator, but within a few years I had a little side business doing animated TV contract work for advertising companies - commercials and industrial stuff. I kept doing this after college, after moving to LA for graduate film studies at USC. Very soon I had to quit the animation, as grad school was intense and full-time and I wanted to be in live-action anyway.

After years of being paid to write or rewrite a lot of films that were either false starts or never even got that far, a few film projects actually started percolating. One of them was an animated feature I was initially hired to rewrite, quickly moving up - officially as story supervisor but actually the ghost-director on the project. While at this studio (Imagi), Sean and I became friends, and later on I met Brian. Increasingly admiring Sean's creativity and the stuff he and Brian were coming up with, I thought about their creation, SUCKERPUNCH AND LEROY, and thought it would get more "creative altitude" as an animated project. So I suggested that the three of us develop it together as a cartoon, and Brian and Sean very generously took me on as an equal. After pitching it around town, we were "almost" there - signing a deal with New Regency TV to develop the thing for broadcasts - until about two months later when they (New Regency TV) completely imploded as a company. They were shut down by the parent organization and our contract was worth nothing.

What remains, though, is a warm friendship, and that's worth a lot more to me than anything we would've created. But I think all of us still see a day when SUCKERPUNCH might see the light of actuated pixels, once our individual careers gain a little more heft individually and/or cumulatively... And when that happens, we're going to laugh a lot. That's what I'll enjoy the most. Being paid to laugh with my friends.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for proof Zaki exists... I think Sean writes his blog when off his meds. :)