The west coast Titmouse has migrated eastward. To Manhattan, in fact. The Hollywood-based animation shop founded by Chris P and his wife Shannon opened a second office in 2010, initially to take a crack at Superjail! season 2. The TriBeCa-based shop has since taken on a bunch of commercials and TV series gigs, often working in concert with the Hollywood team. It’s a busy time for Shannon and Chris P, but not too busy to answer some questions for us about bi-coastal business, studio rivalries and bringing jobs back home:

AARON SIMPSON: Why did you decide to open a NY studio?
CHRIS P: Really, it was an easy decision to make. I came up in NY. I went to SVA and worked primarily at MTV in the mid-to-late nineties. I always thought I’d work in New York or at least be bi-coastal – a concept I’d recently given up on. I had resigned myself to a life in LA. When Shannon and I got the call from Adult Swim that they were interested in Titmouse starting a studio in NY, we jumped at the chance. Holy Shit! It might just be possible! We still kept in touch with a bunch of East coast artists. A lot of our family lives in New York and New Jersey. If we had been asked to start a studio in another city, it would have been a way harder decision. New York feels like home. It just made sense.
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Ed Skudder’s first video interview about his wildly-popular Dick Figures series is now up on FlashFacilito’s YouTube channel. In this 7-minute interview, we get some insights into the production process, the voice acting, and the road to creating Bath Rhymes, the fan-made music video.

On October 24th, the popular Spanish-language Flash animation channel FlashFacilito will launch an interview with Dick Figures creator Ed Skudder. Here’s a taste of what’s in store:

Pascal Campion, an animator who we’ve featured here a number of time on ColdHardFlash, is the subject of this documentary short, titled Inspirational Artists: Pascal Campion. I follow his SOTD (Sketch of the Day) blog, usually hoping he’ll post an animation, and his output is nothing short of breathtaking, both in volume and aesthetic. It’s the type of video that makes you want to pick up your sketch pad and see where your pen takes you.

The snow-capped peaks of South Park, Colorado have been witness to many horrors throughout the 14 seasons of the hit animated series. We’ve seen a headless Britney Spears, the rape of Indiana Jones and the all-powerful Mecha-Streisand. But starting this past March at 10:30pm, South Park viewers have been whisked across the country to a New York City brimming with science-fiction beasts that would kick Mecha-Streisand’s ass. It’s the setting for Ugly Americans, the new Comedy Central series created by Devin Clark that conjures a melting pot city filled with unspeakable ingredients. We meet vampires, demons, werewolves and aliens, but there’s also another horror lurking throughout the show – the beast of bureaucracy. You see, the central character is Mark Lilly, a social worker at the Department of Integration, which is the first and often last refuge of the squids, worm-creatures and talking trees that arrive in this gruesome Gotham.

After gestating the concept online, Clark developed the series with David M. Stern (The Simpsons, Monk), who also served as an EP on the project. Clark and Stern then turned to two animation studios to bring the show to life. First on the job was Augenblick Studios (Superjail!), appropriately based on Brooklyn, for development and pre-production, and then the majority of the Flash animation was produced at Cuppa Coffee Studios (Glenn Martin, DDS) in Toronto.

With the first batch of episodes under his belt, Clark took some time to answer a few questions for CHF, and below that we quiz Augenblick Studios founder Aaron Augenblick.

SIMPSON: Huge congrats on the new series. A big premiere back in March, positive reviews and now the additional episode order for October 2010.

CLARK: I feel amazingly lucky to get the opportunity to have one of my ideas brought to life; and to have so many fantastic, creative and smart people helping. But it’s funny, I’ve been so caught up in production, so busy, sometimes I feel like I don’t even get an opportunity to get excited about how big a deal it is. So, only recently, I’ve been like “Oh, this is a show I made. It’s on air. Holy cow.”

SIMPSON: Take us back to before the Atom.com deal.
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