Mike Owens, a Minneapolis-based animator working at Puny Entertainment, recently added his artistic skills to a film titled American Noise: The Savage Re-Birth of the American Dream. Owens’ segment, Immigrant Song, was animated in Flash in less than 2 months, and below you can see his final piece. Beneath that is the animatic, which was drawn right into the Flash timeline.

The animatic

For more info on Owens’ work on this project, check out his blog. Owens was featured on Cold Hard Flash back in 2006 for some TV spots he created.

The Deli Artists United, an animation studio based in South Africa, created this Flash-animated segment for the live-action film Straight Outta Benoni.

I just spotted the title sequence for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie over on Tirefirefilms.com, and bumped into, Devin Flynn, the animator who brought it to life. Flynn confirmed that he and Todd James built this insanely cool sequence in Flash. (YouTube link died - here’s a crappy quality remix, with sped-up video)

For the upcoming film The Ten, which hits theaters August 3rd, director David Wain called upon New York’s Augenblick Studios to animate one of the 10 vignettes loosely based around the ten commandments. Around 1 minutes into this trailer and again at 1:45, you’ll see brief clips of the animated work from the film.

The team behind the film are the masterminds of the comedy troupe The State, who also created Comedy Central’s Reno 911!. Below are some stills from the film, which stars Paul Rudd, Winona Ryder and Rob Corddry.

The New Hampshire Union Leader recently ran a story titled NH filmmaker gets actor Leslie Nielsen to voice a role in new animated film. Created by Bryan Waterman, The Waterman Movie is currently scheduled to go to DVD early next year. The plot follows comedy rock duo 16Buttons Of Justice whose TV show fails, and they hatch a plan to send the ratings through the roof in an effort to save the show.

The animation team of four is headed up by Christopher Boe, and is based on the the Waterman series which has become a popular collection over on Newgrounds.com.

With his feature film now ‘in the can,’ Tyler Gibb has started releasing a series of ‘making of’ shorts detailing the process behind Minushi. The story takes place in a town under martial law and follows Trixi who “sets off on a journey to find the only family she’s ever known; her older brother, Griffin.” Below is the trailer for the Flash-animated film, which was 4-years in the making.

Eddie Mort and Lili Chin, the creators of one of the first Flash-animated TV series ¡Mucha Lucha!, have embarked on an independent feature. Los Campeones de la Lucha is also being animated in Flash, and the team is now churning out the animatic. Below are three clips which Eddie and Lili recently released on their blog.

storyboard drawings by Eddie Mort

Sorpresa vs Abuela Extremo from Act 3
storyboard drawings by Rafael Navarro

Meeting Rayo X from Act 1
storyboard drawings by Eddie Mort

Eddie shared a few thoughts with me this week on the making of the film.

AARON SIMPSON: What have you and Lili learned through the process of making Los Campeones?
EDDIE MORT: Los Campeones shows that you don’t necessarily have to go the traditional US broadcast way to get your ideas into production. Of course it means we work with an ‘independent movie’ size budget, but it has also allowed us to have total freedom in all aspects of the design, script and story content. The film is being financed by TV Azteca in Mexico, for their new Features division. The plan is to first release and establish the film theatrically in Mexico, with other countries to follow.

AARON: What’s your crew like?
EDDIE: It’s a skeleton! Lili Chin is taking care of designs, turnarounds, character poses, color styling, animatics, etc etc etc. I’m doing designs, storyboards, BG Layouts, animatics, script editing, voice direction, film direction, some music. The rest were freelancers - Rafael Navarro did storyboards for Act 3, Jake Bauming did storyboards for Act 2, Monkey Paw Media have been doing BG keys and Evan Newby did some additional designs. And we have DJ/Composer Phofo as Music Supervisor.

AARON: Who is animating the film?
EDDIE: We will be taking care of some of the actual animation ourselves, but using another studio for the majority of the film.