It’s a Poor Workman Who Blames His Tools

The title of this post refers to an old adage that’s pretty self-explanatory: when someone falls short of doing their job well and claims, “I didn’t have the latest widget (or doo-dad, or thingamajig),” or “I have the latest widget (or doo-dad, or thingamajig) but it’s broken (or the batteries died, or running last year’s software),” it often means that their skills are weak and it’s easier to blame their tools than accept responsibility for their own shortcomings.

This week, I had a pretty formidable challenge thrown my way and I believe I did a pretty good job of meeting and beating that challenge.

The “Secret Song” Is Out!

In my most recent post I mentioned that I was about to work on a “secret song” with Dan Castellaneta this past Monday.

A Near-Death Experience

That’s what it felt like this week. Maybe that sounds a bit dramatic, but the news just came so suddenly. Ever since this season began and people would ask me how much longer the show would last, I’d tell them that this was the final season of the actors’ current contracts and that, for the show to continue, a new deal would have to be struck sometime between December and next February.

John K. Visits Springfield

If you saw The first 2 minutes of NABF17 “Bart Stops to Smell the Roosesvelts” last night, then you saw another couch gag animated by a guest artist. Like last year’s Banksy surprise, there was no advance warning that the couch gag you’d see was produced by John Kricfalusi, the creator of REN AND STIMPY.

The Food Wife

Firday, September 9 was a pretty busy day for yours truly. I spent pretty much the entire day at FOX working on 4 different episodes of THE SIMPSONS.

First up, directing Yeadley Smith as she sang a new song for the episode with guest star Lady Gaga. No, Gaga wasn’t there with us. She recorded her part for the show a couple of weeks ago, but Yeardley’s been away in New York for most of August and has just returned to L.A. so I was able to go into the studio with her to record her singing part for a special song in the show. More details as we get closer to the airdate next spring.

Music Editing 101 – Dubbing

You were probably starting to think I’d never get around to explaining dubbing. I’ve mentioned it here and there in some of the posts leading up to this one and if you’re not familiar with film audio lingo, then you might have been asking yourself what the heck I was talking about.

Music Editing 101 – The Spotting Session

We’re about to have our first music spotting session of the new season. What exactly is a music spotting session? It’s the first of seven music editing steps that I go through on every episode of THE SIMPSONS or any of the other shows or movies I work on. I’ll write a different blog post about each of the seven steps as I experience them on our first episode of the season.