A new TV series pitch has emerged from Hornet Inc. It’s called The Bloody Band Aidz, and it follows a group of world-travelling, hell-raising rockers who happen to be blood-soaked band-aids. Well, in the series, they group is no longer travelling anywhere – as part of a court-ordered mandate, the rockers have been ordered to be the house band at a New Jersey dive called Dongs Place. The series was created by Aaron Stewart (who we interviewed back in 2005) and Todd Lamb. Stewart directed this music video below, and Efrain Cintron animated.
[NSFW - animated nudity and sex and buckets of red-hot bloooooooood!]
If you hadn’t already noticed, Disney’s Jetix network has relaunched as Disney XD. New series have been added to the slate including a couple digital 2D projects – Kid vs. Kat (created by Rob Boutilier) and Jimmy Two Shoes (created by Edward Kay and Sean Scott). Kid vs. Kat is produced in Flash, while Jimmy Two Shoes is brought to life using Toon Boom Harmony. Jimmy Two Shoes is being produced by Breakthrough Animation and TELETOON, with help from Mercury Filmworks. Here’s title sequence:
Kid vs. Kat is from Studio B Productions and YTV Canada. Here’s the title sequence, which we showed here before:
Ever wonder how people make all those animated 8-bit films? You know, the ones that look like Atari or NES games? Well, one method involves the Pixel Tools V2 plug-in for Flash, which lets you draw shapes with a pixel brush, or with pixel shapes. The tool was created by Patrick Mineault, who has since retired from the Flash developer game.
But his tool lives on – and it was recently employed by Mark Salisbury and his team at Worldwide Biggies on a title sequence. Below you can see the pixel animation for the new SpikeTV show Mocap LLC, which premieres in April.
The Razzberry Jazzberry Jam, the musically-inclined pre-school series from Trapeze Animation, is now airing on CBC in Canada. The Flash-animated project is directed by Campbell MacKinlay and airs Saturdays at 6 and 9pm, and at 7am on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Congrats to the Trapeze team!
Like Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s web empire Google, Craig McCracken’s path to world domination began as a school project. While the TV series and the internet search giant launched within weeks of eachother, it was 1992 when McCracken first brought Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup to life in a student short titled Whoopass Stew! A Sticky Situation, initially introducing the threesome as The Whoopass Girls. The Google gang may preach their altruistic “don’t be evil” mantra, but The Powerpuff Girls immediately “dedicated their lives to fighting crime and the forces of evil.” Let’s watch a few scenes from this original short:
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. Read the rest of this entry »
