Here’s the transcript from the bit with Tom Fulp:

It definitely made the Internet more fun and more lively. It would have been a much more static and quiet place if not for Flash… Whether you’re good at drawing or good at programming or good at music, you can inject that talent into Flash in some form to create something.

Related posts

• The Flash Animation 10 – Most Influential (49)
• Zombies Invite You to Star in JibJab’s Latest (4)
• Xombie Animated Series Final Episode (0)
• Worrel Pairs Up Penguins For JibJab (0)
• What Andrew K Did This Summer (5)

Here’s one of the latest segments from the show, titled TMZ: Jesus Gossip!

Related posts

• Yankovic and SuperNews! Dial Up Ringtone (0)
• Swine Flu Animation From SuperNews (1)
• SuperNews! Takes on the Evite Master (0)
• SuperNews! Investigates Footballis Interuptus (1)
• SuperNews! Hipsters Launch 2001 Odyssey (1)

Stu recently took some time to answer a few questions about the project and the new studio:

AARON SIMPSON: Did you pitch this concept to Nicktoons, or create it specifically for them?

STU GAMBLE: We’d written it down in some dusty notebook 10 years before, and we brought it out and decided to take it to the next step. Actually it was one of those big clean outs – I just love emptying old boxes from years past. You never know what you’re going to find. He was just laying there in the bottom of the box so we pulled him out (after sundown of course), gave him CPR and took him to Nick. They loved the idea, which at first was just a one minute short, they wanted to try and give it legs so we took it away and devised a plan to make it more than a one story deal.

AARON: How did this character first come to mind?

STU: I love the old Nosferatu and Dracula movies and really wanted to do something that had an anti-hero type character in the lead. Someone who we know we shouldn’t root for but at the same time quenched our guilty pleasures. Who doesn’t want the bad guy to win in a movie? For me, they make the most interesting, more complex characters so we came up with Cluckie. Originally it was a one off film – he was a rooster that was also a vampire and the idea was to have him going after the chicks in the hen yard, then the sun starts to rise and his primal instinct of crowing the sun kicks in. Of course, the sun kills vampires so he gets stuck with a real dilemma, run and live or crow and die – he chooses to crow!

AARON: The lack of dialog and fiendish plots reminds me of the old Road Runner shorts. What projects and artists inspired this production?

STU: You hit it on the head, one of my personal favorites was the Road Runner cartoons, I loved them – still do! I’m heavily influenced by the golden age of animation and my absolute hero is Chuck Jones. In a way its a homage to my hero – he gave my childhood so much happiness. I’d sit in front of the TV and watch Looney Tunes all day long, and later on in life I’d draw them all day long. Even when I watch them now they still feel fresh, funny and current.

One of the aims for this show was to produce an animation style that reflected that golden age, with great timing, squash & stretch and funny poses but produced in a digital enviroment. I wanted to try and accomplish the same feel as those hand drawn shorts of 60 years ago. I’m not sure we hit it perfect – I don’t think that’s possible – but we made something that shows the same amount of care and love that went into those shorts of yesteryear.

AARON: What’s the rollout plan for these?

STU: They’re already on air in the UK and Europe. Not so sure about the States but we’re entering all five to as many festivals as we can. What would be great is if Nicktoons asked for more episodes. When we pitched the storylines we had around 16 great little stories. Hopefully if they drum up enough interest that’ll convince Nick UK to make some more. They’re a labour of love so even for a small budget we’ll make it work!

AARON: Who designed the characters?

STU: My creative partners Jez Hall, Dan Balaam and I created and designed the character. As I said before, I love the old Nausferatu character so I wanted to incorporate something from that into the design of Cluckie. The most recognizable part of Nausferatu’s design (for me) is his costume, so we adapted that for Cluckie. We created a back story for the character that can be seen in the title sequence, his egg is bitten by a vampire bat so he becomes a vampire from hatching. Because of his lack of vitamin D his feathers are falling out, that’s why he wears a rubber glove on his head – he has an issue with being bold! He’s just your average vampire chicken.

AARON: The background layouts are gorgeous – who is the artist behind those?

STU: I had a definite vision for the backgrounds in the show so I took on the job of designing the background layouts, I also painted the first few to get the style across to my team. After that, a very talented artist named Miklos Weigert took over and ironed out the wrinkles and sprinkled some of his magic. We had colour scripts from each episode painted (by Jez Hall) and from those we expanded the colour pallet and created some lovely artwork. As I said, the show is a real labour of love and you can see that in every frame of the production, we’re very proud of it.

AARON: What software was used in the production?

STU: For the main character animation Anime Studio was used. It’s just so versatile when it comes to character animation. We were really trying to push the limits of the software with this show but it never caved in. We also used Flash in this production, mainly in the pre production phase. It’s the first time we’ve used Flash for digital storyboarding, and now we’ll never go back. It’s just great to keep it all in the digital realm. Flash was also used for some minor animation as well as some of the background production. We’d create the basic shapes for the backgrounds and then take them into Photoshop to spruce them up. For the composition and FX we used Autodesk’s Combustion, we really wanted to add some depth into each scene so it didn’t matter whether it was 20 frames or 200 we made sure that time and care went into everything.

AARON: How do you choose which animation package to use on your productions?

STU: We’ve found that all character work is done very well with Anime Studio. We’ve yet to come across another package that we can get as much out of as that one but a few leaps and bounds have come along within Flash lately so we’re also trying that more. We’ve yet to try Animate Pro from Toon Boom. It looks interesting so maybe we will one day. Our production deadlines are usually pretty tight and we often go for the software package we know can deliver what our clients want, 9 times out of 10 that’s Anime Studio.

AARON: Congrats on launching the new website. What lives in the KidTV area?

STU: KidTV is the section of our new website that showcases all of our favorite work. What we hope is that it grows over the coming months into something of a conversational piece, we encourage visitors to the site to leave comments and views – constructive criticism is a good thing! We also have an area called ‘The Art Of’ where we break down a selection of our bigger productions and go behind the scenes, exposing the bare bones of how we design, our thoughts on the production process and the problems we have tackled on a particular production.

AARON: You’ve changed your studios name. What initiated the change?

STU: Actually it’s a change back to our old name, the company went through a partnership a few years ago. That has ended now and we felt it right to change it back to what it once was and move forward again.

AARON: What’s the animation community like in Budapest?

Great! There are so many fantastic artists here! And the animation history of the country is a very vibrant one. There’s also a very strong embrace of digital technology here which is good for us as we no longer produce traditional animation, we can and still have the facilities to do so but we feel we need to focus on the future of things and we’re pretty much nailing down that bridge between traditional and digital.

AARON: What else is coming up for Freakish Kid?

STU: We’ve got a lot bubbling under the surface. Everything is about to pop but nothing wants to just yet! We’re working on a game for a company in Dubai, Nick UK has commissioned us to produce a series of ten interstitials which once again push the envelope of what we can do. We’re also waiting to hear if the show As Seen On TV for FX International is moving forward. We developing a couple of short films that we want to make and send to festivals around the world and of course we hoping that Cluckie will make some further appearances!

Related posts

• Online Episodes of Cluckie the Vampire Chicken (6)
• Jez Hall and 9 Story Trot Out Wibbly Pig (5)
• Examining Anime Studio (16)
• Cold Hard Relaunch! (39)
• Chubby Dee Cycle in Anime Studio (5)

Four years in the making, Waltz With Bashir went on to grab more award nominations than the crew had artists, but no achievement was bigger than the film’s nomination for the Palm d’Or (Best Film) at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival. It set the tone for the coming awards season, which saw the film pick up the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. Animated films are often left out of the “Best Picture” category, relegated instead to the animation corner of the ballroom, but at the 43rd National Society of Film Critics Awards, Bashir took the top prize – Best Film.

Yoni Goodman, the film’s animation director, took some time between award shows to answer a few questions.

AARON SIMPSON: What has been the best part of the international praise the film has received?

YONI GOODMAN: I think throughout the production our only thought was to finish the film. That was our goal and we thought of nothing past that. Initially it was supposed to be a small art house movie, with very limited distribution, and of course we had our fantasies of how people would react, but we never suspected the movie would go so far and attract that much of attention. The first real shock was the premiere at Cannes. We had heard stories about the event, but nothing could have prepared us for the real thing. At the end of the screening, we had a 20 minute standing ovation from 2,300 people, which was quite a shock (until that moment, I didn’t notice that the theatre had balconies). Later on that week, we were the talk of the festival, and that just didn’t stop. In a way, it hasn’t really stopped since, so we’re still in a 12-month rollercoaster ride.

AARON: Tell us about the whole rotoscoping confusion…

YONI: Well, Waltz with Bashir has 0% rotoscoping in it. We keep fighting the rumor that we rotoscoped, as many people compared our process to Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking life, but the whole movie is Flash cutouts. We did have live reference of the interviewees, but we just used it to learn the movements. There was absolutely no tracing over a video.

David has this great dark, graphic novel, contoured look which we really wanted to use, so I had to come up with a technique that we could work with, and still refrain from doing it in traditional animation. Traditional animation features typically employ 200-300 people. There are the keyframers and inbetweeners and colorists and cleanup artists, but we just don’t have enough experienced manpower in Israel, and no budget to outsource it, so we used cutouts instead.

Every drawing made by David was sliced into many pieces in Flash, sometimes counting to 400 pieces per character, and they were set up in different levels of hierarchy. So like normal cutouts in Flash, we split a character into primary pieces – head, torso, limbs etc.. Each of these was symbolized, and inside each symbol we had another set of layers containing the parts it was made of. This complexity didn’t allow us to draw much of anything from scratch, as we were maintaining David’s original line. Eventually was done using 10 animators (including myself).

AARON: Looking back at the original 2005 pitch short?

YONI: Mainly, we got better at it (laughing).

AARON: What was the goal of the pitch?

YONI: One was to get the budget for the movie, the other was to check how three minutes would hold using this technique. I had quite a lot of prior experience with complex cutouts, but this one was by far the most complex I’ve ever worked with. David Polonsky and I were the only crew members working on the pitch (except for a two or three shots, where I was aided by Tal Gadon) and we had only three extremely sleepless weeks to get it done from scratch. So a few parts of the pitch didn’t meet the later we established later on. These shots were repaired and most of the pitch is actually in the movie.

AARON: How did your process evolve by the end of the production?

YONI: We learned a lot from doing the pitch, but it was only when we got into full production that we got really better at the technique. One of our big decisions hinged on how much should we break a character: how many pieces, how complex, what is a better hierarchy system, stuff like that. The crew had to go through a very tough first 20 minutes of the film before things went really smoothly.

The funny thing is, for all it’s faults, when Ari would go and get more money from investors, the original pitch was still the thing that got people’s attention.

AARON: Which version of Flash did you use on the project?

YONI: When we worked on the pitch we used Flash MX, and we had to convert each shape to a symbol, which made the tracing very slow. We were very happy when the drawing object feature appeared!

AARON: Once an illustrator had finished the artwork for a particular scene, explain the process of preparing that layout for animation.

YONI: Once an illustration was complete (mostly by David, he illustrated something like 80% of the movie), the image was imported to Flash, traced and broken into pieces. The sliced pieces would then be converted to symbols and set in their appropriate hierarchies. Then we would place the sound and the animatic inside the file (after the animatic was done, we sliced the sound according to the shot’s length, that way we knew when it was supposed to end in the FLA). The animatic was placed as reference for timing and acting in a guide layer, and then the animation process began. The first part, moving the main symbols, requires some skill, because things never look completely right – joints are usually breaking and the movement looks very stiff.

Once the main symbols are done, we went into the secondary hierarchy to animate each symbol and compensate for the stiffness, creating a smoother look for the animation. Usually you work in and out, back and forth – sometimes correcting the main symbols after you are done with the inner hierarchy, then going inside and adjusting the new positions. It sounds terribly complicated, and in a way it really is, but still, to get that very fine clean movement, it’s a lot faster (and easier to correct) then traditional animation.

At the end of it all, I think there were less than 10 percent of the film was traditionally animated. The only scene that was fully created using traditional animation was the waltz scene.

AARON: It sounds like very little CGI animation was employed in the film, but many sequences appear to have so much depth. Do people often mistake the animation for CGI?

YONI: A few month ago I went to Annecy film festival, where Waltz with Bashir was the opening movie, and in my speech, as part of my ongoing campaign to deny the rotoscope rumors, I said “this movie has no rotoscoping in it” (my animators asked me to say it). Later on, someone told me there was a rumour that it was all done in CGI. So much for fighting rumours. We had very few shots (10 or so) in which we used Maya, but that was mainly for camera movements. There was no actual modeling, except for a ship and a few houses in the snow which you can see with a very good telescope.

I think most combinations between 2D and 3D animation don’t work so well, and we really tried to make the 3d environment as flat looking as we possibly could. We just placed the Flash animated sequences on flat planes in the 3D environment and moved a camera through them so we could get a depth-of-field feeling. We also got to a point where people mistook very complex Flash cutouts for CGI. For instance, the scene where the tanks are squashing cars, but these parts were all done in Flash. We didn’t do animation in any other software (unless you regard the explosions as animation. These were done in After Effects).

AARON: How else did you use After Effects on the project?

YONI: Every shot in the movie was exported as PNG files and rebuilt in Adobe After Effects. The smoke, explosions and simple camera movements in the movie are all done in AFX. We also used grains and filters to avoid the vector look Flash usually gives.

AARON: During the production, did your team “sweatbox” scenes – or were scenes reviewed in smaller teams?

YONI: Ari already finished the interviews before we began the animation production, then he edited them to a 96 minutes video. After he was done, we sat together, Ari, David and myself, and watched the video, breaking it down to storyboards, deciding which part would be a “talking head” scene, which would be a recreation and which would be a fantasy scene. Ari had a rough idea of what he wanted, but he was very open to suggestions and we had our free say. I would say the construction of the film was a team effort of the three of us (with Ari, of course, having the final say). My team often had suggestions of how we could do things differently and we changed the storyboard many times if a better idea emerged. Eventually, I think every team member has his/her mark on the film.

AARON: Was there a significant amount of final animation that didn’t make the final cut?

YONI: Luckily, no. We had major two scenes deleted, but they were both in animatic, with no real animation. One of those was actually completely designed and ready to go, but we cut it right before we started.

AARON: With all of the various pieces that went into each element, did the software ever strain under the weight of your production?

YONI: As we used highly-detailed symbols with lots of inner-hierarchies, the more you got into the nested timelines, the heavier the FLA would become. Some work files got to a point where they could not be opened on a computer with less than 4 GB of RAM. This is actually the main reason why we only worked with one shot per FLA, and no shot over 40 seconds per FLA, otherwise it would crash the software or make it impossible to work with.

Flash is a sort of a blessing and a curse all at once. It’s a format I find very handy, very easy to produce high quality animation, and it’s very easy to correct and fix animations (once you learn how to build the file correctly), but at the same time, it still has the “internet animation software” attitude to it. I always feel like I’m abusing the software by doing things it wasn’t designed to do, and it’s a shame, because I feel it can do so much more. I’ve been using Flash since version 4, and it doesn’t seem like there have been many improvements in the broadcast field. I actually think Flash MX was much better at handling heavy files and high-rez exports than any other version that came after it.

I have many ideas, and I also read many thoughts (in your site as well) how to improve Flash in that aspect. I think Flash needs to evolve into a broadcast-quality-specific animation software, perhaps as a separate “Flash-based” software that uses all of it’s features but is strong enough to handle the strain. Ari Folman once tried to approach Macromedia (they were the owners then) after we finished “the material that love is made of” and the pitch to present some of our thoughts but they sort of snubbed him out of the building. I would be really happy if they decided to improve the software in that direction.

AARON: How did you celebrate the wrap of the production?

YONI: We went out and got seriously drunk. We had a tradition in the studio – with every 20 minutes of animation we finished (actually, every major event – animatic, 20 minutes, final wrap, going to Cannes, the premiere), the entire crew would go get drunk. Our producer, Yael Nahlieli, would get these insane deals, where she only paid for food but the whiskey was for free, and by the end of the night we would have finished 10-12 bottles of Jamesons. Pretty soon we were banned from most of the pubs in Tel Aviv.

AARON: Would you both look forward to animating with this particular process again?

YONI: I am actually trying to develop a new technique for our next film. It will probably be Flash-based, but I want to use more traditional animation and possibly a different look (we already did this one in Bashir )

AARON: Give us an idea of what the animation community in Israel is like.

YONI: Israel has a fairly small but talented animation community. The jobs available are mainly on short clips, commercials and kids TV series. There’s not enough money available for high profile projects but it’s something that’s growing year-by-year.

The market is beginning to understand how complicated and costly an animation production is, so nowadays when someone wants an animation project they know what they’re getting in to. When we set out to do Waltz with Bashir, it was an impossible mission. Now that we are done, the same type of effort is still is an impossible mission, but if I had a tough time getting 10 extraordinarily good Flash animators, I think I can get 20 for our next project (Which will still be impossible to do, so we’re very eager to start).

Related posts

• Waltz With Bashir Finds Praise At Cannes (2)
• Folman’s Material Before The Waltz (0)
• Bashir Filmmaker Highlights Gaza Situation in Closed Zone (2)
• A Flash Animated Feature is Best of 2008 (6)
• Zafrani Delivers Message On Answering Machine (3)

The episode, titled Damnesia Vu, premieres Thursday, March 19th (tomorrow!) at 12:15 am ET/PT. Below we ask him a few questions about the production, and his response includes a video tutorial detailing his one-man-band process. But first, here’s a :25 second clip from the 2:00 minute sequence he animated.

AARON SIMPSON: When did you produce this segment?

M. WARTELLA: The animation was done entirely by hand over the course of one month late last year. No assistants or in-betweeners or background artists or anything like that. Just cranked it out all myself, which isn’t too bad for a two-minute cartoon. I’d just come off a gig storyboarding the second season of Xavier, and I think the show’s directors, Vernon Chatman and John Lee, were inspired to try something different based on the illustrative style of the animatics I was doing. They asked if I’d be willing to animate a special segment, and of course I said yes.

SIMPSON: What type of creative direction were you given?

WARTELLA: Well, I had worked with John and Vernon on Wonder Showzen, so I already had a bit of insight into their particular brand of humor. The premise of this episode, Damnesia Vu, is that Xavier is kind of “Quantum Leaping” into different lives, sort of a reincarnation theme, and they had the idea that it would be a cool twist for Xavier, a CGI character, to jump into a flat 2D world. They wrote the script, and we just kind of developed it back and forth from there.

SIMPSON: What transpired during that back-and-forth?

WARTELLA: We actually ended up doing two different levels of animatics. The first pass was storyboarding the entire episode. I’d never worked on a CGI show before, so I was curious to see how my animatics would translate into CGI. But the animation house, Cinematico, did a great job and really took the basic boards and added some great 3D flourishes. The next step was going back in and doing a second animatic for just my 2D segment. The second animatic was even more detailed, and here the timing and action were finessed in even greater detail. I’d basically go frame-by-frame through each version with John and Vernon, and sometimes new ideas would come out right there and we’d work them in. Basically just refining and refining, adding more and more levels of detail each time, until it was dense enough and time to draw and animate the final art.

SIMPSON: How much Aztec reference did you pour over before your design style came together?

WARTELLA: A lot. I just spent a day digging online picking up everything I could. I’m into old books like Von Daniken’s Gods From Outer Space and Landsburg’s In Search of Ancient Mysteries, so I had a few other references on my bookshelves. There’s a touch of Egyptian hieroglyphics in there, too. So it was basically comparing all these different images and then applying that look and color palette to my character designs. John and Vernon had this idea that Aztec art kind of looked like Looney Tunes stuff, so I think that was also an inspiration for the segment.

SIMPSON: Vernon Chatman described the show as a “warning… about the dangers of spirituality.” Your episode deals with false idolatry. Do you think the Adult Swim audience will pick up on these messages, amidst the comedy and bloodshed?

WARTELLA: Actually, I think so. I’ve skimmed over some of the discussion boards over on Adult Swim and you’d be surprised how much people pick up on. Personally, I believe that they aren’t nearly as nihilistic as a lot of people think, and that there is what David Lynch calls an “all-pervading happiness” that underlies their writing. But that’s something you’d have to ask them.

SIMPSON: How did the Cintiq change your process?

WARTELLA: Well, I’ve been working with the Wacom digitizer pads since the first PL model came out about ten years ago, and needless to say I can’t imagine working without one. Especially doing animation. The Cintiq is extra special because it gives you the luxury of a large drawing space. I just think it’s a great invention, as important a step forward as going from a typewriter to the first word processor. Now if the entire system were just portable….

SIMPSON: Tell us a little about this tutorial we’re going to watch.

WARTELLA: Well, I’ve spent so many years of trial and error trying to figure out the best way to make professional animation using Flash, and I just thought it’d be fun to share a few secrets with people who might be just starting out or doing animation in their spare time. I hope people will drop me a line and let me know if they found this useful. So in this video, I describe my basic process, as well as highlight a few “tricks of the trade” that were major stumbling blocks on my learning curve. It’s all jam-packed in there fast though, so take notes!

60-second D.I.Y. Animation Tutorial

Related posts

• Superjail Super Interview (30)
• Radiohead/Aniboom Contest Interview with M. Wartella (1)
• Wartella Bangs Away With The Go (9)
• Titmouse Watching the Dethklok (11)
• Titmouse Amplifies Animation on Metalocalypse (1)

McCracken’s crime-fighting cuties wowed the execs at Hanna-Barbera, in particular Fred Seibert, who navigated Craig’s work into What A Cartoon! Show (initially dubbed World Premiere Toons), the seminal shorts program that spawned a string of animated hits like Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo and Courage the Cowardly Dog. After producing four in-house shorts (only one was completed), the show was given a greenlight by the network for a 1998 premiere (all of this development material is available on the DVD that releases next Tuesday – The Powerpuff Girls: The Complete Series – 10th Anniversary Collection). McCracken’s college roommate Genndy Tartakovsky was already a rising star at Cartoon Network, having created Dexter’s Lab, when the two teamed up to produce the first season of PPG. On November 18, 1998, the series enjoyed the highest rated premiere in Cartoon Network’s history, setting the stage for a six season run.

The show went on to win several Emmy awards, an Annie award and in 2002, TV Guide listed their 50 greatest cartoon characters of all time, placing The Powerpuff Girls (collectively) in the 13th spot – ahead of animation legends like Popeye, Porky Pig and even Mickey Mouse. A theatrically-released PPG feature-length film debuted on July 3rd, 2002, and in 2006 an anime-inspired spin-off, titled Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z, bowed in Japan. In the kids cartoon world, hits are often measured in merchandise sales – and PPG has sold more than $1 billion at retail, making it an mega-hit. Moreover, the long-running series played a major role in putting Cartoon Network on the map.

CHEMICAL X BY FEDEX

Ten years ago, when PPG first debuted, cartoons were almost all “shipped” overseas to studios like Sunwoo, Koko and AKOM. The production for the original PPG season was centered in Burbank, where recording, storyboards and timing was executed, but the physical animation was handled at Rough Draft, the Seoul-based studio. In a 1995 interview (conducted by the late Emru Townsend), McCracken had this to say about the outsourcing process:

Going overseas, I’m not there to supervise. So it is frustrating, and we try to control it and give as much direction here as we can, so they can interpret it, but it never has the same finesse as if I had done it here.

On the surface, The Powerpuff Girls series didn’t appear to suffer from all this creative jetlag, but when McCracken got the chance to plan his next production, he aimed to remove FedEx from the equation.

PRODUCTION COMES “HOME”

McCracken’s next original series, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, bowed in 2004 to record ratings. It was business as usual for the Cartoon Network hit-factory, but behind the scenes, the production pipeline was being re-imagined. Before the overseas studios got into the act, most cartoons were both conceived AND produced in the same building. For financial reasons, this model broke in the 80s, and penny-pinching studios found significant cost-savings overseas. But with the arrival of inexpensive digital 2D software, namely Adobe Flash, this type of production was again possible, and McCracken was quick to take advantage. Along with Flash-wizard Eric Pringle, one of the Animation Directors on Foster’s, he architected a system that allowed for US-based production of half of the episodes (the other half going to Boulder Media in Ireland). The show has rung up years of ratings success and multiple awards, further cementing McCracken’s appreciation for this new powerful digital technology.

ADOBE FLASHBACK

Next Monday, Jan. 19, at 8 p.m. (ET, PT), the first new PPG episode in 4 years, titled THE POWERPUFF GIRLS RULE!!!, will debut on Cartoon Network, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the series debut. Here’s a 2:30 clip from the episode:

In this newly-minted episode, Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup return to their familiar roles, as do dozens of artists from the original crew. But, with the Foster’s experience under his belt, McCracken made a few changes to the production pipeline – namely producing the entire half-hour in Flash. Taking it all full-circle, this new episode is loosely based on one of the first PPG shorts, titled Whoopass A Go-Go, which was never finished. In the earlier production, the key to the world is let loose to evil forces, who do exactly what you think they’d do in this situation. We recently had the opportunity to interview Craig, where we cover Flash-animation, pop culture, musical numbers, and his thoughts on world domination…

AARON SIMPSON: If you ruled the world, what would be your first new law?

CRAIG McCRACKEN: STOP BEING STUPID! (to be applied as one sees fit) On second thought, that could get really out of hand. Let’s just go with free puppies for everyone.

AARON: You were certain to not include any musical numbers in The Powerpuff Girls movie, but you dove right in for The Powerpuff Girls Rule. In this week’s production, you poke fun at the more traditional Disney-esque musical numbers – was that your conditional response to “why not musical numbers?”

CRAIG: Honestly, I was Mr. Serious Man on the PPG movie. At the time, I kind of lost sight of how silly PPG was. So when it came time to do this special, I learned my lesson and fully embraced silliness and enjoyed being funny at all costs. Mojo singing was simply the funniest idea – so that’s what went in there.

AARON: Even though you’d had years of experience with it on Foster’s, were you hesitant to use Adobe Flash on a PPG project?

CRAIG: Not at all, I saw it as a perfect chance to get PPG to look the way it was always supposed to look. The show was designed with very tight, crisp, bold, clean-ups (a “clean-up” is the refined artwork derived from original, rough drawings). Because it was originally hand-drawn, the line weights always varied, but with Flash we were able to get that crisp look every time. Looking back at the PPG series, I realized I designed a Flash show before Flash was invented!

AARON: After several years away from PPG production, did you find yourself needing a refresher on any aspects of your own show?

CRAIG: Surprisingly, no. I was actually amazed at how fast the writing and drawing of the characters came right back to me. It’s like there’s this PPG switch in my head – as soon as I flicked it on, everything powered back up like no time had gone by. It was pretty cool actually.

AARON: As far as animation goes, would you say this special is closer to a TV episode or the feature.

CRAIG: Oh, the TV show for sure. The movie was a lot of fun and I’m really proud of what we did on it, but it’s the show that defines PPG for me. Our animation director Eric Pringle researched the old episodes to get the same feel as the hand drawn animation Rough Draft produced. Inbetweens in Flash can have this mathematical perfection that can appear a little cold. So the team was removing tons of frames, putting things on 2’s to get a warmer, human feel.

AARON: How many Foster’s team members had previous PPG experience?

CRAIG: 31 out of our 100 person crew worked on the original show. It was really great to have that many people come back to contribute to this special. It was like getting the band back together.

AARON: It’s almost as if Tears For Fears wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World for PPG. Who came up with this pairing concept?

CRAIG: I wanted the Mojo quitting sequence to be all Wes Anderson-style – slo-mo walking with the perfect song driving the whole thing. I think I suggested it, or it could have been Lauren, or maybe Derek Bachman – I really can’t remember. I just recall that we were all laughing so hard at the idea. I do remember thinking “this is perfect, I just hope we can get the rights to use it!” Here’s an inside scoop: the reason we had Mojo sing it and not use the original recording is that it costs half as much to license the song if you have someone else perform it. It’s cheaper AND funnier!

AARON: There were plenty of pop culture references in this special – Spider-Man, Wacky Races, Peanuts – and even Mario Kart; and even more in past episodes – Wizard of Oz, Monty Python, Austin Powers and The Karate Kid, to name a few. Are you a pop culture junkie?

CRAIG: Yeah, definitely. I’m fully hooked on the pop culture stuff I grew up with, but I’m realizing it’s generational. ‘Cause when it comes to what’s popular now, I have no idea what these young whippersnappers are into today. I’m old.

AARON: Did Flash help speed up the production?

CRAIG: Oh yeah, it cuts the animation phase of production practically in half. But the best thing on a Flash series is the animators are right down the hall – it makes doing retakes super easy. We make the whole cartoon in one building like the old days at Termite Terrace, though today it would be more like Terabyte Terrace. (Hey, I like the sound of that!)

AARON: PPG has sold over $1 billion in merchandise since the first episode aired. Do you have a favorite piece of PPG merchandise?

CRAIG: I’ve said this before but it still stands true – when your show gets a Piñata, you know you’ve made it.

AARON: You’re currently playing a key role in Cartoon Network’s latest shorts program – Cartoonstitute. Is it similar to previous CN series incubation efforts?

CRAIG: It’s kind of a cross between Oh Yeah! and What a Cartoon! Show. It’s a fast-paced, artist-driven program without a lot of executive interference. The idea was to get artists into the studio and start generating new content that could be considered for future Network series. It’s going really well; in just 9 months we have 25 shorts in the pipeline and the Network is already seeing show potential in some of what we’ve done. It’s cool to see a new generation of artists coming in with fresh ideas that I hope can be the cartoons of the future.

We now switch over to Eric Pringle, the Animation Director on THE POWERPUFF GIRLS RULE!!! and creator of Prophet Buddy, for a few questions about the production.

AARON: Is PPG a natural fit for Flash production?

ERIC PRINGLE: Yes, PPG transitioned very smoothly into a Flash pipeline, but it’s not unusual – graphic/stylized shows look and work very well with the software. Now with all of the assets we’ve created for the special, we can probably animate another one completely out of reuse, except you’ll have to wait another 10 years to see it.

AARON: What type of research did you do to get ready for the production?

ERIC: I pretty much watched the entire first season of PPG frame-by-frame. It took a very… long…. time.

AARON: Did you and your team employ the standard overshoot-and-settle method of animation?

ERIC: Not quite. The antic-overshoot-settle method has become somewhat of a crutch that many Flash animators use to get their scenes animated quickly without much thought. I’m guilty of using this formula myself and have been trying to shake it over the past couple of years. As a result of us trying to get episodes animated within our fast-paced schedule on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, this method was used throughout the series and kind of became the animation style for the show.

While studying the original PPG series, I was noticing that the animation felt more solid as a result of not jumping around and moving only when it really needed to. If we were to animate PPG in the Foster’s method, the special probably wouldn’t feel like the original series and, personally, it was very important that it did. So when production began on PPG, a rule was set for the animators to not use unnecessary antic-overshoots-settles. As a result, we either substituted these actions with slow ins/outs, or simply popping to pose without any settles. It was a little difficult for everyone to switch gears right away, and there might have even been a few unnecessary antic-overshoots-settles that squeaked through into the special. You can totally hate me if you catch any.

AARON: Tell us about the stock models you and your team built for Bubbles, Buttercup and Blossom.

ERIC: Because the designs of the girls are really simple, we were able to make the most complex Flash character rigs in all of Burbank, seriously. I’m sure none of this will make any sense, but we separated each of the girls’ elements into a series of layers and nested symbols.

First, there was the character symbol. Inside the character symbol we had the head, arms, legs, body, hair symbols each on separate layers. Inside of the head symbol there was the face symbol that was masked and then a thick head outline that sat on a layer above it. By symbolizing the face inside of the head, it allowed us to reposition the face under a mask to either make it front view or 3/4 view and to make it tilt up and down.

Inside of the face symbol, all of the elements of the face were separated so we could reposition or skew them individually to maintain an organic drawn look. Nested in the face symbol, there were three animated mouth chart symbols, animated eye chart symbols, pupil symbols (which nested the iris and highlight so they could be skewed and animated individually from the rest of the pupil), masks for the pupils, a series of eyebrow and cheek poses, and a hair symbol for the bangs that contained over twenty different bend poses for when the head would tilt up or down.

Then the symbols for the body, arms and legs were also set up – each containing twenty or so bend poses. Since each girl is almost the same design, we only had to do most of the rigging once and changed the colors on the other two models.

Setting up the girls’ rigs to this extent made it possible for us to animate the majority of their scenes with just the stock turnarounds. Aside from the turnarounds, we only created 50 special poses for all three girls. With Mojo Jojo’s rig, which is a bit more complex, we couldn’t get as creative, and we ended up creating 120 special poses.

AARON: Were there any surprises during the production?

ERIC: Our animator Kristen McCormick had a baby. She was going to name him “Craig McCracken McCormick,” but I convinced her not to.

Related posts

• Foster’s Leaves Home (14)
• Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends Closes Up Shop (6)
• Foster’s Director Forges Own Future (6)
• The 33rd Annual Annies Awards (3)
• Six Point Makes Coco Dance (4)

“We’re excited to premiere The Naked Brothers Band’s first animated special which showcases their humor in a fun, new, fantasy-filled format,” said Marjorie Cohn, Executive Vice President, Development and Original Programming, Nickelodeon Networks.

Mark Salisbury, an athlete-turned-artist, captained a small squad of artists through this ambitious production. Working out of Worldwide Biggies, Albie Hecht’s New York-based company which also produces the live-action series, the team drew from a creative playbook to bring this musical action project to life. We recently caught up with Mark to discuss this upcoming Flash-animated special.

AARON SIMPSON: Give us an idea of how this project came to be.

MARK SALISBURY: As far as I know, here’s how it happened. Scott Martin, my partner at my own company Peach Nova, and I did a music video for The Naked Brothers Band two summers ago. The creator of The Naked Brothers Band, Polly Draper loved what we did on that video and said that if they got picked up for another season that they were going to write an animated episode. I’ve since joined Albie Hecht (CEO of Worldwide Biggies and former President of Nickelodeon), where they produce the live action series. And that’s how it happened…. as far as I know.

AARON: Does the animated version of the property take place in a similar world to the live-action Nickelodeon show?

MARK: It’s a superhero spoof, so it’s pretty far removed from the live-action show. The boys are still musicians, but they’re members of the Supetastic 6, who defeat evil in the music world.

AARON: Who wrote the project?

MARK: Bob Mittenthal and Michael Rubiner. Bob has written and produced a lot of stuff, including Robot Boy, Kablam andKenny the Shark. The script the two of them delivered for this project is one of my favorite animated scripts I’ve ever worked on.

AARON: Along the way, did you work with the writers as the show evolved through storyboarding?

MARK: Yes, completely. Working with the board artist, John Delaney, I added a lot of extra gags, visual gags, and I would call Bob to ask for lines because he’s funnier than I am. The original script had a whole lizard chase sequence, and it was just too big for the production so we had to scale it back a bit. But there were all sorts of little gags I added in along the way.

AARON: The character design process must be more difficult when your team was challenged to capture likenesses.

MARK: Yes, that definitely limits your design. But we had a whole set of designs done and approved before we started production. We had turnarounds done for most of them, but a lot of us here weren’t happy with the direction. So the art director, Tim Shankweiler, redesigned all of the characters. Its always a big risk when you change things that are already approved but it paid off well.

AARON: What did you do to sell you new designs to Polly and the Nick team?

MARK: We did animation samples in both styles as well as final art mock-ups of certain dramatic shots from the show. The original style was very Scooby Doo, which we felt limited our team, and the new one let us go wherever we wanted to go.

AARON: I’m assuming animation allowed you to take the boys in a direction live-action wouldn’t allow.

MARK: Yes, definitely. The whole band has superhero alter-egos. The “A” story follows Matt Pinfield (the former MTV host) and his plans for Global Balding. The “B” story follows Sonny after he has been baldified by a Pinfield ray. Sonny goes to see Dr. Krayzee, an absent minded evil scientist, and hilarity ensues. The story is fast moving and has great moments throughout.

AARON: Tell us a little more about the team that worked with you on the project.

MARK: We had a small, extremely talented team with only 5 animators and 3 designers. Tim Shankweiler, who I mentioned before, art directed. Michael Lennicx was the senior designer and Kirk Etienne was the designer (former art director of Little Einsteins). The animation team consisted of Scott Martin, Frank Summers, Joe Andriola, Barrett Benica and Chris McMurray, who joined late to help out. Conor O’Kelly-Lynch and I handled compositing. We also had two clean-up people – Bianca Franco and Andrew Bogenhagen. So I think that makes a team of 11 or 12 people for a 22 minute show with 370 shots.

AARON: Tell us about the 3D elements you integrated into the 2D world.

MARK: We didn’t have a lot of pre-production time to research the 3D to Flash process, but I had read that you could import Maya 3D elements into Flash as SWFs. So we produced all of the vehicle turnarounds that way and they ended up blending in very well. There are moments that you can still tell its 3D, but someone without an animation background probably wouldn’t. They likely think it’s either a very precise animator or it’s 3D. It also helped that we sent everything through After Effects for a lighting pass which helped take the harder edge off of the 3D.

AARON: Tell us about this After Effects lighting process.

MARK: Well, for instance, the Pinfield space station has this ominous, dark, red lighting. None of the colors were done in Flash, but instead in After FX by lighting the PNG layers. Every layer was exported individually and then lit with specific lighting. It lengthened the compositing process, but it was only on around 80 shots. It added a whole new level to the show – an ominous, evil-criminal mind feel… in a comedy cartoon way though.

AARON: Do you have a favorite sequence in this new movie?

MARK: Yes, the crash sequence. The band is about to crash into Pinfield’s space station and there are some classic cartoon moments in there. There’s also the sequence where Sonny transforms into a lizard as well as the first time we’re in Pinfield’s space station. That sequence features some nice flow and neat camera angles. This show differs from a lot of the half hours I’ve done – it goes by in a heartbeat. As I look back on the production, second guessing myself as I always do, there are sequences I wish I could have lengthened a bit, but then it wouldn’t have had that quick pace that I think makes the show work as well as it does.

AARON: How did you get into animation?

MARK: I started with a degree in criminal justice – the springboard to animation. I was a full scholarship athlete, and I didn’t have the choice to take art as a major because I played both baseball and football in college. I was on the road for a couple weeks at a time during baseball season, so it just wasn’t possible. After a failed attempt at a pro football career, I coached for a while at Yale while I made a 3-minute traditionally animated short. After I finished the film, I shopped it around which led to an animation job. I then moved from Connecticut to Washington DC to live with my sister and study with her at the Corcoran Museum while working the night-shift at Kinkos, and a caricature artist at the mall during the day.

AARON: Do you keep any of the art you created at the mall?

MARK: No, but I still have my Kinkos name tag.

AARON: When did you get your first job in New York?

MARK: 1996 I officially started my animation career at a place called Muffihnead Productions down on Canal St, it was a short lived gig. Late in that year, I took a job outside the city in Connecticut for a CD-ROM game company, and that’s where I met Scott. Scott and I were the lead animators on a lot of WB products, Animaniacs, Quest For Camelot games. In 1998 I moved over to Nickelodeon.

AARON: What type of animation do you watch in your personal time?

MARK: I watch a ton of the old Popeye and Fleischer Superman episodes. I like watching stuff that will never be done again – like Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, which is my all-time favorite. I love looking at the credits on those and seeing that the animation team would consist of two people.

AARON: As America tunes into your project over Thanksgiving, what will you be doing?

MARK: I’ll be playing with my 3 kids. I didn’t get to see them too much during this production, but to quote my son Jack, “Daddy’s cartoon is gonna be on TV.” So that’s what I’ll be doing. But it won’t last long; our next project is already in production! That’s Albie – he moves fast.

AARON: Can the fans expect to see more Naked Brothers Band animation?

MARK: I really hope so. We had a great time making it and I think it would make an excellent series. We sure wouldn’t run out of ideas for new episodes.

Related posts

• Pixel Flash Animation For Spike Series (1)
• On The Bubble On The Web (4)
• On The Bubble On The Election (2)
• Naked Brothers Fish with Flash (11)
• Yo Gabba Gabba! Gets Gooned (1)

The show is animated by Los Angeles-based animation studio Oddbot Inc, who have also teamed up with Playhouse Disney in the past on shows like Shanna’s Show and Shane’s Kindergarten Countdown. Here’s a clip from the episode titled Movie Manners, and below that we interview Christopher Hamilton from Oddbot.

AARON SIMPSON: Christopher, how did Oddbot wind up working on this project?

CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON: I’ve produced a number of short series for Playhouse Disney since 2003. I directed the Shanna’s Show series, Shane’s Kindergarten Countdown, and was supervising director on Lou and Lou: Safety Patrol during my time at the studio One Red Room, where I also served as the company’s Creative Director. When that company closed its doors in 2006, I formed OddBot Inc. Based on the successful collaborations of our previous projects, Playhouse took a chance on our new studio and asked us to produce another batch of Lou and Lou: Safety Patrol, which later led to an order of the new series Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?

AARON: How much paper and pencil factor into your production?

CHRISTOPHER: Actually, quite a lot. When designing the characters, every rough image was sketched on paper until we landed on a character style we liked. From there we would scan and clean up the images using Flash. This was the same for character turnarounds, props, backgrounds, and even early character test animation. I’ve found that a majority of artists (at least the ones I’ve worked with) prefer designing with pencil and paper over working with Wacoms and Cintiqs. I definitely share this feeling.

Oh yeah, and our director Robert Ramirez likes to thumbnail-out scenes for the storyboard artists on large post-it notes. So we go through a billion of those!

AARON: Who designed the characters?

CHRISTOPHER: The talented Todd Oman.

AARON: What type of animation direction theories went into the production?

CHRISTOPHER: We took a traditional animation approach for Al. Before the production started, we knew that we wanted Al to be slinky, quick, energetic, and very child-like, so we encouraged the crew to squash, stretch, bend, and use smears when appropriate. The animators would rough-out their animation on paper or draw directly into Flash with a Wacom tablet – depending on their individual preferences.

When it came to the human characters, including Mikey, we purposely moved them a bit slower than usual with less extremes. This made for a nice contrast between Al and the rest of the characters.

Also, Al’s acting is all pantomime and the animators couldn’t rely on much dialogue for support – just a lot of vocal expressions and reactions. So they really had to push Al’s poses to support his many emotions.

AARON: How many animators are on the crew?

CHRISTOPHER: We had about seven animators working on each episode.

AARON: There aren’t any outlines on the characters. Does this tend to make it easier to animate?

CHRISTOPHER: Absolutely! With no outlines, you’re just left with solid shapes, and that definitely made a difference when it came to moving that alligator around. We made the decision very early in production (even before the designers started) to leave the outlines off of the characters. During Lou and Lou: Safety Patrol, animators painstakingly made sure that there was never any separation of outlines and that the line thickness was always consistent. Obviously, this is a very time-consuming task, but it was essential to achieving a solid look for that particular show. On Can You Teach My Alligator Manners?, I really wanted the animators to spend most of their time pushing Al’s acting and not worry so much about keeping his details consistent.

AARON: Have you taken any of Al’s lessons to heart throughout the production?

CHRISTOPHER: Absolutely, we can all use a reminder or two about manners!

Related posts

• Disney Chefs Up Healthy Helping of ZeFronk (2)
• Yin Yang Yo! Ready To Go (15)
• Yin Yang Yo Premieres on the Web (14)
• Toon Boom 4.5 Now Available (0)
• Tim Yoon, Flash Producer (2)

The show takes place in what can only be described as an alternate universe, far removed from civilization in a monstrous lockdown called Superjail, which is run by a dandy known simply as Warden. Almost everything beyond that is downright weird – there’s a dutiful, levitating robo-worker named Jailbot who handles the dirty work, a booze-lusting operations chief, a pair of teleporting inmate twins (twinmates?) and then of course the talking vegetables. But it’s the playfulness in the animation that takes it into another realm – Warden can tie himself into a knot, ride to work on a rainbow or blast an inmate to the moon with the touch of a button. Inmates can be delivered to the prison in a giant bird’s egg, sent to their cell on a rip-roaring rollercoaster, or blown dry with a 20-foot tall hair drier. It’s the elasticity of Tex Avery, the madness of Ren and Stimpy and the trippiness of Yellow Submarine all baked into one bloody, animated pie.

For those of you paying attention to the first two episodes, you may have learned that each installment brings a new title sequence along with a fresh escape and incarceration for a recitative jailbird named Jackknife, but what else do we know? If you go watch the series pilot, Bunny Love, at adultswim.com, you can view a whole mess of commentary videos as well. In one, the creators discuss how each episode will feature some all-out madness – a no holds barred fight scene. It’s a legacy from Christy and Stephen’s short Barfight, which is boils down to the biggest, longest, most insane bar fight in this or any other galaxy. We also know there’s 10 11-minute episodes in the first season (all of which have been delivered), and that every frame of animation was produced in Brooklyn at Augenblick Studios. It ranks right up there with Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and El Tigre as the most intense TV production ever attempted with Flash. Plus, Superjail! surely features the highest volume of “traditional” TV animation created on US soil in over a decade. That’s not what anyone would have predicted 10 years ago when Flash debuted as a fancy new tool that could make shapes dance on screen. It’s all the more impressive when you realize that Augenblick did it on an Adult Swim budget, which are known for being thrifty. You gotta hand it to the Augenblick team, who pulled off a real coup here.

Aaron, Christy and Stephen

Aaron was joined on the animation front by Chris Burns and Kristofer Wollinger, character layouts we handled by Christy Karacas and M. Wartella, while background layouts were delivered by Jeremy Jusay and Will Krause.

That’s about as much as we know, so let’s turn to the show creators to learn more. We’re first joined by Christy Karacas and Stephen Warbrick. Following that, we again meet with Aaron Augenblick, a producer and animation director on the series. Aaron joined us for a 2-part interview back in 2005.

AARON SIMPSON: Christy and Stephen – this psychedelic world is extremely unique and sadistically hysterical. How did the concept come about?

Barfight

STEPHEN WARBRICK: We tried to come up with a show that was somewhat unique but also interesting… conceptually and visually.

CHRISTY KARACAS: Our buddy Dave Hughes showed Barfight to Adult Swim and they were psyched so they asked if we wanted to pitch something. Stephen and I then kicked around some ideas. I had an old pitch about a jail show but it was more like a reality show parody, and we were like, “eh, that’s boring.” What if it was the craziest most insane, dangerous jail ever created run by a psychopath who was more ’supervillan’ than ’superhero?’ And it all kind of came out of that. A Charlie’s Chocolate Factory that was a jail instead. Kind of like a kids show except but not for kids. I think the world itself happened because we all like fun, weird stuff. Creating a world that had no rules that existed in its own special place also allowed us to have fun and make all these little worlds that existed inside the big world.

SIMPSON: Did you visit any jails for research purposes?

STEPHEN: No… not intentionally anyway.

CHRISTY: Hell no! Jail scares the crap out of me.

SIMPSON: In the first episode of Superjail! we return to the bar, where you staged Barfight. Do you have a favorite watering hole, and does it inspire your animation?

CHRISTY: Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern (GPT) in Williamsburg Brooklyn. 32. oz bud for $3.50 – can’t beat it. But I think it probably hurts my animation when I show up to work hung-over.

STEPHEN: When we were making Barfight we went there almost every night. Work our day jobs…work on Barfight till about 1am…. head to GPT.

SIMPSON: The two of you met at MTV. What project were you working on at the time?

Christy Karacas

CHRISTY: I was a BG designer on Daria and Steve was on Celebrity Deathmatch. We met there and did Barfight – which is how we got introduced to Adult Swim because they saw Barfight (which is hilarious because it got rejected from every festival we entered it into). Its funny because not only did me and Steve work at MTV, but Aaron Augenblick, George Fort (BG designer on Superjail!), and Tom Marsan (character layout on Superjail!) all worked at MTV too. NY animation is a small world – I’ve known all these people for almost 10 years.

SIMPSON: The Warden has been described as “a sadistic Willy Wonka.” Is the original Wilder film a favorite of yours?

STEPHEN: Yes. The film still seems magical even as an adult. Gene Wilder was amazing in the movie. The remake…not so much.

CHRISTY: Yea, its a great film and I also love Wilder in Stir Crazy. If we get another season, I actually think we need to make the warden even MORE sadistic… maybe going into a ‘Heath Ledger Joker’ territory. Also, after we started Superjail! I saw The 5000 fingers of Dr. T, which is also totally insane. Its got a Warden character who has imprisoned all these kids so they can play a giant piano. It was written and designed by Dr. Seuss, another huge influence of Superjail!. It’s definitely something you should check out if you like Superjail/psychedelic/fun/weird type stuff.

SIMPSON: With a half-submerged Statue of Liberty in the opening credits, are we to assume Superjail! takes place far in the future?

STEPHEN: Maybe.

CHRISTY: Never assume anything in the world of Superjail!. And no its not far in the future.

SIMPSON: What is Jailbot’s job at Superjail?

STEPHEN: He is like the Warden’s gopher. The Warden designed him so he has a few bugs.

CHRISTY: To bust through walls, abuse prisoners and make a mess. Jailbot’s like a red-headed stepchild. The Warden built him but doesn’t show him any love. Its something that is touched on but we’d love to explore more in the future.

SIMPSON: The twins appear to have magical powers. Will we ever learn how they gained these powers?

CHRISTY: You will definitely learn more about them, but I can’t comment further on that one.

SIMPSON: Having produced traditional animation in the past, what’s your take on the Flash or digital 2D approach to production?

CHRISTY: My personal favorite stuff is hand-drawn, gritty stuff like you’d see on Sesame Street or School House Rocks (my favorite!). But we don’t see this much these days, and that’s why we went with Aaron’s studio, because Augenblick makes some of the most amazing looking stuff with Flash I’ve ever seen. I think Aaron’s studio had the knowledge/taste/experience to make Superjail! look as traditionally hand-drawn as we could. When I tell people it’s done in Flash, they often don’t believe me! So my take is pretty positive.

Stephen Warbrick

STEPHEN: Like Christy said, even though Superjail! was produced in Flash, there is nothing “untraditional” about it. Each episode is completely hand drawn.

SIMPSON: Stephen – your production experience has included work in both 2D and CGI production (Beavis and Butthead, Celebrity Deathmatch, Daria, Ice Age 2, Horton Hears a Who). Does a particular medium help or hurt comedy, or is it simply another tool?

STEPHEN: No. I don’t think the medium hurts the comedy. I think the oversaturation and the retelling of the same story does.

SIMPSON: Christy, aside from the theme song, will you band Cheeseburger’s music be featured in future episodes?

CHRISTY: We might turn up again. You can also hear it for a second when Jackknife carjacks the car in the pilot.

SIMPSON: What illustrators, shows and animators inspired the look of Superjail!?

CHRISTY: Dr. Seuss, Gary Panter, Crumb, Sally Cruikshank, Mad Magazine, Vince Collins, Looney Tunes, the Fleischer brothers, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, School House Rocks, Sesame Street, Itchy and Scratchy, kids art, Muppets, outsider art, underground comics add Pee Wee’s Playhouse!

SIMPSON: What animated TV do you both watch regularly?

STEPHEN: No too much. Some Simpsons and some South Park.

Quiet Please

CHRISTY: I don’t really watch any animated shows regularly. My favorite things right now are Tim and Eric and I just saw Mike Grimshaw’s Quiet Please [not safe for work] which made my stomach hurt. I think the stuff I watch would be old Looney Tunes, weird stuff on YouTube and Popeye. I like anything that’s fun, gross, retarded, weird or awesome.

SIMPSON: Awesome. We now welcome Aaron Augenblick, founder of Augenblick Studios. Aaron, How did you and your studio first come to be involved with Superjail!?

Aaron Augenblick

AARON AUGENBLICK: We were working on Golden Age when Christy and Steve called me out of the blue. I met Christy years ago at a festival, and we were touring around with our thesis films after graduation; he was screening Space War and I was showing Midnight Carnival. Then in the late 90s, Christy, Steve and I all worked together at MTV Animation. Years later when they approached us, they had just been greenlit to make a pilot for Superjail! and were looking for a studio to produce it. I had always been a huge fan of Christy’s animation, so it was a very exciting project to take on. My regular Augenblick crew all jumped on the production. I had just worked on The Ten with David Wain and suggested him for the voice of the Warden, which ended up being great. So a lot of things fell into place in a short amount of time.

SIMPSON: When did Augenblick Studios start production on the series?

AUGENBLICK: Everyone was pretty excited about the pilot, so we were greenlit for a series order pretty fast. We started in October 2007. But that included writing, audio recording, and a lot of things that came before full animation production. I am proud to say that every stage of the animation process occurred right here in our studio in Brooklyn; nothing was sent overseas.

SIMPSON: Do you work off a tight script, or does some of the storyline and dialog come out of the storyboarding process?

AUGENBLICK: I set up the production in a different way than most current animated productions (I think). We started with brainstorming meetings in which a small group of us got together and hatched the loose plots for every episode. After that (before scripting) Christy would create thumbnails for the entire episode. At that point we had a scriptwriter write the script using the thumbnails as the direction for the story. This was very important because it allowed the visuals to dictate the direction of the show, rather than the dialogue. After that, in every stage of production we encouraged the artists to add their own visual gags wherever they could. All of these areas of creative input added to the mind-numbing avalanche of information you can find in every episode.

SIMPSON: Has your team completed the initial order?

AUGENBLICK: Yes! We have finished 10 episodes, which have left many of our artists in comas.

SIMPSON: Long hours on this one?

AUGENBLICK: We have a relatively small team and every artist is given a great deal of creative freedom. Unfortunately, with that creativity comes an overwhelming workload. Most people told me they were working harder, longer hours than they ever had in their life, but it was worth it because it was so much fun.

SIMPSON: There doesn’t appear to be much re-use in this series. Was Flash still a useful tool for your team?

AUGENBLICK: We approached Superjail! knowing that we wouldn’t be doing a lot of reuse, because we wanted the show to be very organic, and not worry about staying on model with anything. We wanted to avoid the same locations and character animation if we could help it. All that being said, we couldn’t have created this show without Flash. Flash is not merely an animation tool for libraries and motion tweening. It also allows for a platform where the artist can draw directly into the program (no scanning) and where ink and paint are very easy. We approached the animation in a completely traditional way, except that we were doing everything in Flash.

SIMPSON: Who’s a bigger drunk – Drunky or Jared?

AUGENBLICK: I don’t believe in labeling people.

SIMPSON: Can you tell us anything about the shorts you produced for Yo Gabba Gabba’s 2nd season?

AUGENBLICK: The people at Yo Gabba contacted me because they were fans of our work, especially Wonder Showzen. They asked us to do some cartoons for their show and it was really fun. They were super cool and let us do whatever we wanted. They have a great show; the closest thing to a modern day Sesame Street. We did three cartoons: Wear Your Glasses, Cloudie, and Cover Your Mouth.

SIMPSON: What original projects are coming down the pike at Augenblick?

AUGENBLICK: We are now producing our own signature coffee, cell phones, and clothing line for the coming year. A lot of exciting things are happening at Augenblick Studios!

Related posts

• Radiohead/Aniboom Contest Interview with M. Wartella (1)
• Xavier: Renegade Angel Interview With Animator M. Wartella (5)
• Adult Swim Superjail and ‘Sipp Clips (5)
• Aaron Augenblick, part 1 (2)
• Wonder Showzen Season 2 (10)

This isn’t our first interview with Tom. Check out Tom The Tank Engine, our 2-part interview from 2005. And another big thanks to the team at Mondo Media for the help producing this interview – especially to Jason Costello and Nate Johnson, the man behind the camera.

Related posts

• Comic-Con 2007 Wrap-up (3)
• 2006 Comic-con Wrap-up (2)
• Building Castle Crashers (6)
• 2D Animated Castle Crashers a Hit (2)
• Xombie Animated Series Final Episode (0)