The new Happy Tree Friends project is officially live. It’s a spin-off project called KA-POW!, and it’s all-action, all the time. Okay, there’s comedy too… and blood. Lots of blood. The first episode is titled W.A.R. Journal Operation: Tiger Bomb and you are invited to watch:

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The project is based out of Mondo Media in San Francisco, but for this new series they’ve invited the gang at Ghostbot to animate. These companies have teamed up before for projects like Mole in the City, but for KA-POW! we’re seeing some new takes on the art direction.

To learn more about that and other topics, we are now joined by the co-creator of Happy Tree Friends, Kenn Navarro, writers Warren Graff and Ken Pontac, and Brad Rau, who works at Ghostbot. I should mention that I’ve now started consulting for the team at Mondo, so read cautiously. I’m working from the inside now, and I’m not to be trusted.

AARON SIMPSON: As you now watch your creation spawn a spin-off series, it must be pretty thrilling. Did you have any idea your original short would grow into something this popular?

KENN NAVARRO: Not at all! I remember back when we did the first series of shorts and we thought we would move on to other shows after HTF was over. In fact, we did work on other things here and there, and it wasn’t until we put out the first HTF DVD that things got crazy. Our creative director at Mondo Media, Dean MacDonald, made this animated chart that tracked the DVD sales of First Blood (named after Rambo), when it first went for sale on the site. There was an 800 unit mark for break even and we thought we would never reach that goal. We watched the numbers grow and Dean updated the chart weekly. We cheered and celebrated when we broke 800 about one month later. I was already overjoyed at the fact that so many people loved the show enough to buy the DVD and was more than happy with that success. But the numbers kept growing and growing and growing. Pretty soon we lost track on Dean’s chart because it went too high! That’s when we really knew there were way more twisted people out there than we originally thought.

AARON: As you look back on that first episode of HTF, how do these new episodes compare?

KENN NAVARRO: Oh man, it’s hard to watch those old episodes now. Like most artists, we are our own worst enemy. All I can see are the mistakes and weird funky stuff. We made those shorts at the dawn of the Internet age. People were dialing in on 56K modems so we had to make the Flash episodes as tiny as possible. We were working in Flash 3 and had to set the frame rate at 8 fps. There was also a limitation on both the number of library assets we could have and the length of the show itself. Actually, one of the reasons why those first shows were so short (around a minute or less) was so the audience could watch with the available technology. Today, there are cell phones that are more powerful than the computers back then, so it’s not even a consideration anymore.

Since that time, I’d like to think we’ve gotten better at writing, drawing and animating these little guys and it’s certainly helped that Flash continues to evolve and become a better production tool. Of course, the Internet has come a long way since those early days of saving files on floppy disks. But those original episodes still hold a special place in my heart. I think all those technical limitations actually helped us and forced us focus HTF into what it’s all about. It allowed us to distill it down and pack as much humor and punch as possible into the shortest amount of time… and that continues to inform the episodes we work on to this day.

AARON: You guys are no strangers to animated blood, but is this the bloodiest HTF short you’ve worked on?

WARREN GRAFF: Actually, this doesn’t have as much blood as I would like. Did you know it’s only cartoon blood? Just shapes colored red. What’s so gross about that? I was pushing for real blood but I kept getting voted down. They said we couldn’t because of legal reasons. I say they sold out.

KEN PONTAC: I disagree, especially given the short length of the episode divided by the large quantities of flying plasma. I think there’s a formula to figure out the proportion of gore over time per episode, but if I ever knew it, I’ve forgotten it now. I blame our schools.

AARON: What’s the secret to drawing bloody innards?

BRAD RAU: Google image search. Don’t do it… you’ll be sorry.

AARON: Brad, tell us a bit about this animatic segment we’re about to watch.

BRAD: One of the really fun things in this episode was creating an arch-villain for Flippy. We wanted to make him a truly formidable enemy, someone who could dish it out as good as he takes it. At one point he even strangles Flippy with his own eviscerated guts. Now that’s good times! For the animatic, we tried to frame the fighting a little closer than normal to make things more hectic and less planned. As we moved forward into layout and animation, we started playing around with the shaky camera to make things even more unsettling and spontaneous. Of course, the more spontaneous we wanted it to look meant we had to plan things out even more than normal. Vicious irony.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

AARON: How has the production of KA-POW! differed from previous HTF stuff you guys had worked on?

KENN NAVARRO: The biggest difference is that we’ve tapped into our buddies over at GhostBot to handle the production of the shorts instead of doing it in-house with our regular team. We’ve had a long history of working together and they are bringing all their amazing design sensibilities and expertise to these intense action-oriented animations. I also wanted to shake things up a bit and introduce a slightly different art style for each new short, like what we usually do with our guest director series or “irregular episodes” (Buddhist Monkey, Mole in the City, Ski Patrol, Dino-Sore Days, etc.). The results have been totally kick-ass!

WARREN: Since I’ve been competing in the Olympics recently, I haven’t been able to write on site. I send my ideas and thoughts via carrier pigeon. They should be there any day now.

KEN PONTAC: Having GhostBot do the animation has enhanced everything. Their design style is perfect for the new direction we’re taking and they know HTF inside and out. Plus, they always have a nice pile of bagels and schemer when we visit their studio, and they keep my coffee cup filled, which is crucial for my creative process.

BRAD: Like Ken said, we had the opportunity to redesign the look and feel of the show on these new episodes. With these new action-oriented shorts, we took a different approach to everything - from design to boards to animation to compositing.

AARON: Let’s take a look at some of the production artwork:

[Show as slideshow]

AARON: The line-style utilized in KA-POW! is a new approach. Is that drawn directly into Flash?

BRAD: Yes, everything was drawn directly into Flash. Even though it’s all vectors, we wanted to give it a more hand-drawn, ink feeling.

AARON: Is Flash used throughout the production pipeline?

BRAD: Flash was the primary software, but we also utilized After Effects for all the compositing and some camera work.

AARON: For Flippy’s freak-out sequence, what software did you utilize to create the hand-held camera effect?

BRAD: A lot of that sequence was animated by the nefarious Jayson Thiessen. He simulated all of the hand-held camera effects directly in Flash. Too good!

AARON: What, if any, inspiration did you guys draw on for the jungle layouts?

BRAD: What happens in the Pu Kradeung jungle stays in the Pu Kradeung jungle.

AARON: A number of GhostBot folks are listed as writers of this episode. How does the team collaborate on the story?

KENN NAVARRO: It usually starts out with our core writing team (Warren, Ken and I) just talking broadly about where we want to go or what kind of stories and gags we want to do. Then we’ll hook up with the GhostBot team and brainstorm some more and see what gags work best. Knife fights, arm wrestling competitions and hamster racing isn’t unheard of at this stage of the game. We continue to hash it out until we’ve got the beats of the story working and everyone is either laughing or vomiting… or both! If all else fails, we usually just duke it out Thunderdome style until we come out with a funny script.

KEN PONTAC: For the KA-POW! stuff, Kenn and I met at Mondo and came up with the characters and stories. Since Warren is doing five-to-ten for that assault rap at the pre-school (total frame up if you ask me; the three-year-old punk swung first), he can’t be in the room with us and is either on the phone, on IM or email. After we beat out a story, we go to GhostBot and have a round table discussion, where, over bagels, schemer and coffee, we hone the episode. I’ve started to video these sessions and the embarrassing movies will doubtlessly find their way to a DVD bonus feature section or YouTube or something.

WARREN: That’s not how it works at all - we start with the title. We then send that over to GhostBot and they take it from there filling in the story, action and animation. We really don’t have to give them credit, but we just try to be nice.

AARON: How do you think fans of the traditional HTF would will react to this new series?

KENN NAVARRO: I’m really hoping they like the new batch of shows; I know we certainly do! It’s given us a new level of excitement working on the KA-POW! series because it’s opening new doors for us in terms of stories, characters and gags. We’ll keep on making them as long as the fans keep enjoying them! Also, just because we are doing KA-POW! doesn’t mean that we won’t be doing anymore of the regular Happy Tree Friends series. As everyone knows, you can’t keep Happy Tree Friends down! They’ll keep coming back… and back… and back. In fact, we already have a new HTF Halloween episode lined up for October and more Smoochies in the works. There’s something for everyone!

WARREN: I think they will be scared at first. Then happy. Then probably a little hungry. Finally, they will get sleepy.

KEN PONTAC: The response on the HTF forums has been very positive, and all of us here are grateful for the support. We’ve had fans spreading the word all over the Internet, so hopefully we’ll get new eyes on the show and blow some new minds in the process.

AARON: Have you guys watched any of the HTF mash-ups on YouTube?

KENN NAVARRO: They’re so AWESOME! There are some really great ones out there that I wish we could have done. We definitely have one of the BEST fan bases on the web because they are very active, full of imagination and energy. The success of the show is really because of all our fantastic fans. They’re the ones that champion the show and do all the mash-ups and post on the forums and do all the fan art, etc. I love them all!

KEN PONTAC: I love that the fans feel compelled to do this sort of thing, and the juxtaposition of the images, music and sound bites is often surprisingly clever. I hope the new KA-POW! stuff inspires a new generation of gruesome mash-ups.

Tags: Ghostbot, Happy Tree Friends, Jayson Thiessen

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