Adult Swim and the indie record label Ghostly International have teamed up to bring 19 free downloads to the web. The first and last track of this compilition were then animated in a video called City Suckers staring BoyCatBird, which was directed by Jessica Milazzo and Daniel Garcia. Backgrounds were done by Liz Artinian, and the Flash animation team included Chris Siemasko, Nick Bertonazzi, Dan Forgione, Dave Haines and Anne Witbeck.

[link] - see the video link in the lower right column

In October of 2007, CHF featured M. Wartella’s psychedelic music video for The Go’s track You Go Bangin’ On. He joins us today for a very insightful interview into his process, his past music videos and his recent work on Adult Swim’s upcoming series Superjail.

AARON SIMPSON: How did the You Go Bangin’ On music video land on your plate?

M. WARTELLA: Well, we’ve been friends with and following The Go since their Sub Pop days. We try to catch their shows when they come through town (New York City), you know, hang out, drink their beer, and over the years we’ve just kind of become friends. Since they were looking to do something different for their latest record, they asked me to do the album art. Of course, as soon as I heard the new tracks, I was happy to oblige because I think this is their best release to date, and the critics seem to agree so far. But basically, the band decided they wanted to have an animated music video too, so that is how it came about.

AARON: Did you “pitch” your animation concept to the band before starting?
M. WARTELLA: At first, we wanted the whole video to be animated, kind of like a Yellow Submarine or Josie & The Pussycats thing where the band is drawn as cartoon characters. But as I started thinking more about it, I realized that most people, especially the band’s fans, would probably want to see real pictures of the group, not my drawings. So we started playing around with more of a Terry Gilliam/Monty Python paper cut-out approach. Of course, I realized that this was going to involve a photo shoot, and once I knew we were gonna have to do a shoot, I decided that we should just film the band “live” against a black backdrop, and then superimpose a “psych-out” style animation on top of them, like an old Jefferson Airplane or The Strawberry Alarm Clock type thing (below). Read the rest of this entry »

Jonti Picking, the founder of weebls-stuff.com, knows exactly what it takes to make a viral short. The ingredients are simple: eggs, talking toast and badgers.

Over in TV land, development executives also have fairly specific parameters for what will make a hit series. Whether you agree with their methods or not, the system has turned out some of the funniest moments in comedy history. Executives look for unique shows with likable, empathetic characters, strong villains, a distinct point of view - or a handful of other elusive traits that lead to high ratings and big profits. This creative navel-gazing is not all hot air.

Some of these “rules” are worth considering while you create your ideas, but its a simple fact that you’ll never know what concepts work until the audience has their say.

With web series, this reality is even more obvious. Most “hit” series that originated on the internet don’t follow the majority of these TV conventions.

And if you tried pitching series like Homestar Runner or Red vs. Blue to TV executives 10 years ago, you’d find yourself flanked by security as you exit the studio.

Or take the shorts on weebls-stuff.com. The 32-year old Picking started the website back in 2003 and his knack for making netizens laugh has shot the portal into the upper echelons of online comedy. He’s since built a blossoming media company - complete a line of toys, posters, t-shirts and a DVD. And now with help from w00t!media, weebls-stuff.com even has big-time corporate partners like Cadbury and T-Mobile.

But regardless of the influx of corporate dollars, his site continues to roll out weird stuff that would have a tough time landing interest in TV land. Go watch the first episode of Weebl and Bob and imagine trying to pitch the concept to a development executive: “Well, you see, there’s this egg, Weebl, who sort of mumbles funny stuff, including his undying love of pie. And his friend Bob, who also likes pie, is deathly afraid of bees. They tend to discuss pie or dress up like anime characters, visit France and then in one episode they get a visit from Stephen Hawking.”

I laughed while I wrote that last paragraph, but I suspect the pitch room would be eerily quiet. Most development executives would be straining to understand where the “entry point” is or how the series can stretch to 50 episodes. Ironically, after a considerable amount of online success, Weebl and Bob ended up with a 30-episode order for MTV UK.

As far as web comedy goes, it appears we’ll need a new rule book. Audiences, who now vote with their mouse clicks, have nominated some of the most bizarre shows as the new kings of comedy. “Viral” series like Salad Fingers, Strongbad Emails and Weebl and Bob break the comedy mold we see every day on television. Funny is still funny, but this is a whole new chapter in comedy.

We’re now seeing the second rise of online comedy, led by Stage 9, Comedy.com, The Onion, Crackle, 60frames, SuperDeluxe, Atom (the only site in the first wave of online comedy) - and most are bankrolled by big, corporate parents. They’re all equipped with development pipelines intent on cracking the “viral” code which has all but eluded big media. Its an unenviable task. Cable’s 300+ channels has become synonymous with overkill, so what do we make of the web’s 10,000+ comedy options? Breaking through this level of clutter will take time, something I hope corporate parents are prepared to suffer.

Feeling lost? Perhaps Picking’s success will help illustrate a few symptoms that can lead to this “viral” disease:

Low Cost: Adobe’s Flash software has helped in that category - and Picking’s crew at weebls-stuff.com have produced handfuls of inexpensive Flash-animated shorts that have gone wildly viral. He uses small teams of animators, who work on a short for a week or so, and the result is a short that costs in the low-thousands. Producers looking to find that magic short will likely create handfuls of duds before one takes off, so keeping the costs low helps. I spoke with the Ask a Ninja team last year, and they were shooting their comedy shorts against a green screen painted in their living room.

Musically Driven: Music was the original thread through most of the original animated series. Series like Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, Happy Harmonies and Silly Symphonies not only featured music, but their titles suggest a musical imperitive. Jonti Picking began his entertainment career in sound engineering, and shorts like Magical Trevor, Badgers and Kenya all feature his infectious, wall-to-wall music. Other examples include JibJab’s This Land, Chronicles of Narnia (Lazy Sunday) and The Evolution of Dance.

Bizarre: Television has been home to some weird series and in the era of Adult Swim, this trend seems likely to continue. But if the web is good at anything, it’s for revealing our taste in the odd. Take or House of Cosby’s, JoeCartoon.com’s Frog in a Blender or Weebl’s On the Moon series, which features The Toast King, Insanity Prawn Boy and the Moon’s version of Keith Moon - Moon Keith Moon.

Time: This may be the tough one for studio-backed online efforts. Weebl and Bob started mumbling their first pie-rants in 2002, the year the internet died. Out of the ashes of portals like Icebox, Hypnotic and Pop.com, Weebl and his pal Bob slowly grew an audience that now tops 1.5 million uniques a month. Thisjustin.com, HBO and AOL’s portal, barely opened their doors before packing it in. The lesson here is that an online audience must be cultivated over time, and not every site can expect to hit the immediate jackpot like funnyordie.com.

But as you embark on your search for the next viral hit, you can’t forget the essential ingredients - eggs, talking toast and badgers.

Jonti Picking recently answered a few questions for an exclusive CHF interview. Below we learn how he got his start in online comedy, what his writing process is like and why timing is so damn important.

AARON SIMPSON: What’s the secret to making a viral online short?

JONTI PICKING: There is no secret since you just can’t go out and make a viral. It’s impossible. You can make something that you hope will become viral and that’s it. Viewers make things viral and I can’t say this enough. Anyone who says different should probably be ignored (certain US ad agencies, I’m looking at you). I’ve made things I’ve been really pleased with but they’ve just not clicked in the right way and I’ve made things I’ve thought “Meh. It’ll do” only to have them be wildly popular.

AARON: Your background is in sound engineering. How did you find yourself crossing into animation?

JONTI: I completed a creative music tech course after art college which had a section on new media (mainly Shockwave) and a bit of web design. Before all this, I was playing around with animation packages on the C64 and Amiga too so Flash really just melded all my interests into one handy package. After college, I eventually started as a Flash developer for a big, London new media company. Then one day MTV called asking to show Weebl and Bob, which I was making in my free time. After that I just concentrated on the animation.

AARON: Had you been making films since you were young?

JONTI: Not really. I was was mainly into drawing comics and making up silly little tunes about sausages called Fred or a penguin balancing things on it’s nose. I guess not much has changed.

AARON: What was it about the website b3ta.com that inspired your original animations?

JONTI: It was the general sense of humour that they had going on. It really got me thinking about using the tools I knew to make things I enjoyed rather than just making things for work.

AARON: At what point did you realize that your Flash-animated short film Badgers had gone viral?

JONTI: I was actually away the weekend I released Badgers so had no idea what was going off until Monday. Once I’d checked my email and looked at the site hits I had a fair idea it was pretty popular. Oddly enough I’d said in jest to some guys I was working with weeks before that it was going to be massively popular.

AARON: How did you arrive on the idea of a looping music animation?

JONTI: When I’m writing the music I’ll have the tunes looping for hours as I work out what I’m doing with them. I basically want everyone to suffer as much as I do.

AARON: How long does it take to produce a typical Weebl and Bob episode?

JONTI: About 3 days if we’re feeling inspired on the writing front. The actual animation is usually fairly quick these days as I’ve built up quite a library of actions for them both which is expanding all the time. I do like to have something specifically animated for each episode though.

AARON: How many people are involved in the production?

JONTI: We just use one guy at a time on each animation but two or three writers on the animations with plots. Including me, we’ve got three animators now who all work on different things at the same time. Peabo is currently doing commercial work and Wonchop (our new boy) is doing a loop about arse melons.

AARON: At what point did you start adding production help?

JONTI: When I started Sumo Dojo (my old production company) we got Peabo involved, as I liked his work. I’d not really thought about it before but now I see the benefits of production support as I actually get a day off now and then. Since we started Weebl’s Stuff ltd. we’ve been really busy with commercial jobs outside of the website so hopefully I’ll be getting a few more animators if it carries on.

AARON: What commercial jobs have you been working on lately?

JONTI: There’s a couple of pieces for TV we’re working on along with some animations for a TV channel website. On top of that, there are some games and animations for a brand of fizzy drink.

AARON: What effect did the series of 30 MTV shorts have on Weebl and Bob?

JONTI: It made me hate the sight of them for a while since I was making an episode a day in order to meet the deadline. But now I like them again.

AARON: Would Weebl and Bob work as a regular TV series?

JONTI: Possibly, with some actual backgrounds they could work. I think something like Cat Face or On the Moon would work better though.

AARON: Have you been offered TV series since the MTV effort?

JONTI: We’ve had a bit of interest but nothing has ever come of it. The problem seems to be that the chaps we speak to all move to different companies shortly after we’ve spoken to them. I think is the lesson to be learned here is - if you like your job, then don’t bring us in for a meeting.

AARON: Do you have a particular favorite animation on weebls-stuff.com?

JONTI: I’m undecided. I think the one I’m working on at the moment could be my favourite so far though. I’m actually trying to push myself a bit with it.

AARON: You’ve begun featuring animations that were created outside of the Weebl world - like Daim’s Death Kitty and the Fat Man. Are you actively looking for new series and shorts for the site?

JONTI: Kind of. If we really like something then we’d absolutely want to have it for the site. I figure we can help promote artists whose work we like and it’s a nice feeling to be able to do that.

AARON: How did you come to establish a relationship with Cadbury?

JONTI: The chaps who sort out our advertising sales (w00t!media) arranged it all. They’re total dancers and seem to know what they’re doing so we let ‘em. They act like an agency for us really, which is nice.

AARON: How did you wind up partnering with the w00t!media gang?

JONTI: We needed a way to pay for the server costs as it was getting stupidly expensive to run (I think we run on 3 different boxes these days). Cheechy, the chap who makes sure our forums work and other behind the scenes techno gubbins, suggested speaking to one of his chums about ads. That chap was Austen who started w00t as a result. He’s doing pretty well these days and looks after loads of people. What I like about them is that they try to get advertisers who fit a site’s audience (at least in the UK. Not sure what US guys see).

AARON: Explain how you and your co-writer Chris Vick (Skoo) work together. What’s your process for writing a new script?

JONTI: Generally we’ll both be on our secret little IRC channel talking crap when an idea for a script will start to form. If we’re on fire we suggest lines right there and can have a script sorted in about an hour. If it’s not going so well then we’ll go off and write around the ideas, then email our scripts to each other, offering tweaks and suggestions for improvements until we’re both happy.

AARON: I’ve read that your and your team rely on action script to animate - as opposed to keyframing. Any truth to that?

JONTI: No truth at all.

AARON: How much of the physical animation and design are you involved with now?

JONTI: I’m still involved quite heavily in most of them though I let Peabo do his own thing as he’s better than me anyway. If I’m not animating something myself then I’ll generally just offer suggestions on scenes and motion. I think most of it’s about timing to be honest.

AARON: And what’s the key to timing?

JONTI: Mixing up the rhythm and not being afraid of pauses and a fair bit of trial and error. I spent a good 2 hours tweaking the motion of something the other day because I didn’t feel it was right. In the end, I bought one of the plugins from Trick or Script and then it was spot on.

AARON: Do you see sponsorships and product placement as a better solution than preroll ads?

JONTI: Yes and no. If the client fits then sure, why not? Something like Creme Eggs ties in nicely to Weebl and Bob. However there are obviously constraints on what you can write in those cases. I prefer to do completely bespoke cartoons where possible for commercial work. For the Prawn To Be Wild games series there was no way it could have been done without sponsorship by T-Mobile as it took a lot of time to make - and by a lot of people. But it effected the same old issue - deadlines. I would have liked our schedule on that one to be a bit longer in order to make things more polished. Swings and round-a-bouts really.

The major bonus of sponsored animations and games is the fact we can afford to make other things with no advertising in them.

AARON: Do you see gaming as an important part of the future at weebls-stuff.com?

JONTI: I love games and Flash has really matured as a tool for making something decent. I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas I’d love to get made simply because I’d like to be able to play them myself. The games on the site aren’t as popular as the toons, but at the end of the day as long as I enjoy it and a few other people do then I’m happy.

AARON: How do you see our entertainment consumption habits evolving over the next 5-10 years?

JONTI: Everything we watch will have a small picture of Brian Blessed in the corner who shouts at you if you start touching yourself. Porn will die out overnight.

AARON: You’ve been credited with visual effects work, like your additions to Resident Evil. Is this something you continue to work on?

JONTI: I wish. That was through the new media company I worked for. I basically designed the map of the Hive but other people made it look good.

AARON: Are there any online animated series that you check in on regularly?

JONTI: I’ll check out David Firth’s stuff and Adam Philips’ work. I should probably pay more attention to Homestar Runner too but I’ve kinda slipped on that front.

AARON: What animated TV shows do you watch?

JONTI: The Clone Wars series was really good. While I don’t watch them regularly, I love Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frisky Dingo and Robot Chicken. I’ve given Modern Toss a try but it’s just not funny. Dexter’s Lab is also quite wonderful, as is Powerpuff Girls. Most of the serious stuff that get’s made for kids though is so generic it hurts though. What happened to Godzilla and Godzuki? And The Centurions? Power EXTREEEEEEEMEEEE!!!!!!

David Cowles, whose illustration work has appeared in dozens of magazines ands newspapers, teamed up with New York-based studio FlickerLab to create Skitterville - an animated pilot. The world of Skitterville centers on a caterpillar named Bob Chubby and all of his insect buddies.

Cowles explains:

Flash was a perfect match for the characters, since I first did the character designs in Freehand, which is also vector based. The animators at FlickerLab did a great job of assigning body languages for the various characters, and once we got on the same page about going for that 50’s limited animation look, the results were amazing.

Here’s the test reel:

Director Harold Moss and producer Sally Anne Syberg recently answered a few questions about the project.

AARON SIMPSON: Can you tell us more about the plans for the Skitterville test reel?

HAROLD MOSS: We are working with David Cowles, the creator of Skitterville, to find a home for all our good friends in Skitterville. It’s a beautiful place filled with fabulous bugs of all stripes and sizes, and we’re hopeful at finding a place for it soon, either as a 1/2 hour animated series, or as shorts.

AARON: How did FlickerLab end up teaming with David Cowles on the project?

SALLY ANNE SYBERG: Michele Weiss and Nancy Kanter at Playhouse Disney approached FlickerLab in 2005 about a pilot for their preschool block. We did a test and subsequently the pilot. David is an incredibly talented fellow and we all got along very well. After Playhouse Disney passed on the pilot, we stayed in touch with him and continued to work on Skitterville and his other properties as well.

AARON: Can you explain the production pipeline involved in the project, and who was responsible for each step?

HAROLD: For the test reel, Animators Nikolay Nachev and Phil Lockerby took David Cowles’ characters, which were created in Freehand, and converted them into Flash files. In Flash, they built some basic walk, crawl, flutter and fly cycles for each. FlickerLab Art Director Zartosht Soltani worked off of David’s background sketches and painted several full backgrounds. We combined these cycles and backgrounds in After Effects to give a sense of each character’s personality, and how they moved through their world. This was edited to a first pass at a theme song composed by me and composer David Wilson.The pipeline for the 22-minute pilot follows:

David Cowles created the show and designed the characters and the world of Skitterville. He sold the show as a pilot to Playhouse Disney, and worked with their writers to develop the script.

Playhouse Disney brought us together on the FlickerLab side, Harold Moss directed, Sally Anne Syberg produced, Frank Gresham animation directed, Zartosht Soltani art directed, Phil Lockerby and Nikolay Nachev were lead animators, David Zung and Frank Gresham created storyboards.

1. We received designs from David Cowles, and script from Michele Weiss at Disney
2. Zartosht Soltani worked with David Cowles character designs and sketches to create the look of the world. It was a conversation between them, carried out in with lines and ink. This conversation continued with David throughout production regarding the personality of the animation, the look of the characters
3. David Zung created rough storyboards based on the script and rough VO record
4. Harold Moss and Sally Anne Syberg cast the show
5. Nikolay Nachev and Phil Lockerby began creating animation samples and walk cycles
6. Harold Moss directed the voice-over in New York and LA
7. Frank Gresham tightened up the storyboards based on the edited voice track



8. Storyboard animatic was edited
9. Backgrounds and animation began
10. Compositing was done with exports from Flash and Photoshop backgrounds in After Effects
11. Sound Design started by Tom Lino
12. Final music composed by Harold Moss and David Wilson
13. Online edit completed at FlickerLab

AARON: David is a well-known illustrator, but he’s also an animator - did he have a strong vision for how the short should move?

SALLY ANNE: David did have a strong vision for how the characters could move but our animation director, Frank Gresham, and lead animators, Phil Lockerby and Nikolay Nachev, were very enthusiastic about Skitterville and lavished their attention and skills on the characters. David knows that others are more skilled at animation than he is and gave FlickerLab plenty of creative and interpretative freedom.

HAROLD: This was a continuation of the conversation between the artists at FlickerLab and David Cowles. He had a very strong sense of who these characters were, having lived with them in his head and on his screen for years. He imparted the essence of this to the animators, and they in turn offered up their interpretations. This back and forth helped yield a real richness to the characters and their style of motion.

AARON: Who wrote the soundtrack for the pilot?

SALLY ANNE: The soundtrack for the pilot was written by Stuart Kollmorgen who was at Red Dog, but now works as Big Yellow Duck.

AARON: How long has Flickerlab been utilizing Flash in animation productions?

HAROLD: FlickerLab started its life in 1999 creating an animated Flash series for the web, This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

HAROLD: We soon turned that expertise to film and television, creating the first Flash-animated content to be broadcast by Cartoon Network - two pilots for Adult Swim:

Saddle Rash

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The Finkel Files

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

HAROLD: We also produced the animated sequence A Brief History of the United States of America for Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

HAROLD: We have since used Flash in countless productions for broadcast, film, and online.

AARON: What else is in the pipeline at FlickerLab?

HAROLD: What isn’t? We have a live-action puppet/animation kids series in development and a documentary series combining animation and live- action. We are continuing our animation of Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen shorts that run during his show. We are currently animating a second in a series of spots for the American Heart Association. We recently animated a beautiful spot for St. Joseph Medical Center in Baltimore.

AARON: Thanks, Sally Anne and Harold. Beautiful work.

This past Friday, my wife and I attended the 35th Annual Annie Awards, which were held on the UCLA campus for the first time. As you may have read here a few months back, it was a proud night for Flash animation.

The big winner at Royce Hall was undeniably Pixar’s feature film Ratatouille - which wrapped up 10 awards. On the TV side, two series took home a pair of trophies - Robot Chicken and Nickelodeon’s Flash-animated series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. The show, which was created by Jorge Gutierrez and his wife Sandra Equihua, walked away with awards for Best Animated Television Production for Children and Character Design in an Animated Television Production, a category Gutierrez was nominated for two years ago. Congrats to Dave Thomas, Tim Yoon, Gabe Swarr, Roman Laney and the crews at Boulder Media and Six Point Harness. [read Cold Hard Flash interviews with Gutierrez and Yoon]

El Tigre was also nominated in two other categories:

• Monica Kennedy for Character Animation in a Television Production
• Shawn Patterson for Music in an Animated Television Production

Below is one of the El Tigre clips Patterson submitted for the awards. Its from episode 9, titled Yellow Pantera.

Sadly, it looks like this award-winning show will be ending this year, but it will surely go out on a high-note. Nickelodeon hasn’t picked up the second season, and as Patterson put it on his MySpace page “all great things come to an end.”In the Best Animated Television Commercial category, Acme Filmworks’ Powershares spot, titled Escape Average, took top honors. This weekend, I asked Dave Wasson, the director of the commercial, about the ceremony and production experience:

When Patrick Warburton announced that our Powershares spot had won I was completely caught off guard. At past Annie Awards, I’d been nominated quite a few times, but had ever won. So I had sort of given up on the idea of taking home a trophy. I tried to get Ron Diamond and Gwynn Adik to join me on stage but they wouldn’t budge (they’d decide to give me “my moment in the sun”). I hadn’t written anything down so I gave a short, rambling thank you speech and staggered off stage.

The schedule on this spot was crazy; three weeks total from the time I got the outline from the agency until the day we delivered the finished spot. That said, of all of the projects I’ve directed, it was actually one of the most fun. I really clicked with the agency creatives right from the start, and they were completely open to me taking their idea and running with it (incidentally, in case any agency executives are reading this, this is the best recipe for good commercials - I’m just sayin’). Dave Knott and I completed the storyboard in two days. The following day I made the animatic. Using Flash I was able to create the character designs and backgrounds in record time.

Even though our crew was small, they were super talented, which made it all the more enjoyable. I contacted Brendan Burch at Six Point Harness Studios and he hooked us up with a couple of his best guys. Saharat Tantivaranyoo did a beautiful job with the character layouts, and James Krenske’s animation is kick ass! Back at Acme Filmworks, I worked with Nic Mermet on After Effects to composite all the elements together and add all of the multi-plane parallax. All in all, it was really a great experience.

[Watch Wasson’s Powershares commercial here at Cold Hard Flash]

Back at the Annie Awards, Flash animation continued to echo throughout the night. The creators of Flash, Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, were honored with the Ub Iwerks Award, which highlights excellence in technical achievement. I won’t go into much more detail on this, as a we’ll be posting a lengthy interview with all three guys tomorrow.

But in the meantime, here’s a clip that played just prior to their award. It’s a collage of various Flash-animated projects from the last 10 years. Antran Manoogian, the president of ASIFA-Hollywood, asked me to assemble the clip, and I was happy to oblige. It’s simply a hint at all of the great Flash animation out there - we surely left out some incredible projects. Thanks to Antran for the invitation, and to Les Perkins for helping me put this together.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Alongside John Canemaker and Glen Keane, John Kricfalusi accepted his Winsor McCay Award, which honors “career contributions to the art of animation.” John K’s The Ren and Stimpy Show was credited with “reinvigorated television animation,” but he was also noted for his pioneering work on the internet’s first cartoon series - The Goddamn George Liquor Program, which was animated entirely in Flash.

There were also a handful of nominees on Friday representing Flash-animated projects:

BEST ANIMATED SHORT SUBJECT
Chip Wass’ short Mascot Prep – part of Disney’s Shorty McShorts’ Shorts project - animated at Boulder Media

ANIMATION PRODUCTION ARTIST
Natasha Liberman – Growing Up Creepie - Discovery Kids

BEST ANIMATED TELEVISION COMMERCIAL
Esurance Homeowners spot – W!LDBRAIN

BEST ANIMATED TELEVISION PRODUCTION FOR CHILDREN
Little Einsteins – Disney Channel
Peep and the Big Wide World – Discovery Kids

Lastly, I’d like to congratulate my cousin, Elizabeth Harvatine, for her nomination in the Character Animation in a Television Production category. She was honored for her stop-motion animation on Adult Swim’s Morel Orel, and her pal Eric Towner took home the trophy for his work on another stop-motion project - Robot Chicken. (inset photo credit - Tennessee Reid Norton)

January 20, Adult Swim’s Flash-animated series Squidbillies returned with an all-new 3rd season of episodes. The series, which is produced by the Atlanta-based Williams Street studio and physically animated by Radical Axis, kicked off a 20-episode order with Webnecks, and then they released Tween Steam which you can watch below.

Adult Swim recently posted an online video list featuring the Top 10 Adult Swim Christmas Moments, and amongst the list is this little gem from the Flash-animated series Squidbillies (which is set to launch 20 new episodes starting in January ‘08). In keeping with the holiday spirit, this clip is titled Scrotum Fishhooks.