Have you been tuning into season 3 of Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse? Like the first two seasons, the series is being produced at Titmouse Inc in Hollywood, and they’ve begin to add more elaborate animation. Here’s a clip from a recent episode:

via Drew Newman

M. Wartella, an illustrator, comic artist and animator, has worked on several Flash-animated TV series, including Wonder Showzen and Superjail! His recent gig, however, found him creating storyboards for the CG Adult Swim show Xavier: Renegade Angel. For an upcoming episode, the show creators, Vernon Chatman and John Lee, invited him to bring a sequence to life in 2D.

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?
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Two days of freedom left, gang – then it’s off to Superjail! While a pilot and episode one have already aired, the new Flash-animated Adult Swim series officially premieres this Sunday, Sept. 28, at 11:45 p.m. (ET, PT). The show, which was created by Christy Karacas, Stephen Warbrick and Ben Gruber, combines so much into one eye-popping soup; Superjail! merges Looney Tunes, Willy Wonka, Dr. Seuss, acid-trip psychedellica, raw-dog blood thirst with perhaps just a touch of Kubrick. The resulting hallucinatory collage is so unlike any other TV series in recent memory that it truly defies labeling. With that said, I’ll still try – Superjail! is simply “groundbreaking.” Here’s a clip from the episode title Superbar.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a death metal fan, you probably already know that Metalocalypse, the Flash-animated series on Adult Swim, has spawned a physical, meat-space tour. Deth Tour 2008 is selling out at venues like New York’s Nokia Theater Time Square and The Fillmore in Philly, which hosts the show tonight. My pal Greg Grabianski (writer on Beavis and Butt-Head, SuperNews!, Skunk Fu!) took this inset photo at the LA show earlier this month, of which he said “I’ve never seen anything like it… the crowd was RABID — head banging in unison, mosh pits, it was a frenzy.” I’ve watched several YouTube videos and seen that Flash-animated clips (animated at Titmouse) play throughout the event, including custom shorts like this, which instructs fans on optimum moshing techniques.

Coincidentally, that video was shot by Sarah Gencarelli, a Flash-animator who has worked at studios like Two Animators! and World LEaders Entertainment.

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