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

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

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

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

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

SIMPSON: Take us back to before the Atom.com deal.
Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll have to wait until March 2010 to see the premiere of Ugly Americans, but last night Comedy Central aired a clip during the South Park finale. The show, which is set in an NYC filled with demons, robots, zombies, and assorted creatures, was created by David M. Stern and Devin Clark. The animation is being directed by Augenblick Studios (Superjail) and with animation produced at Cuppa Coffee. Here’s two clips:

The Demon Chick

Sneak Peek

Christopher Ford’s 6-part Stickman Exodus, which was produced for Atom.com, has taken the top prize in the Animation category at this year’s Webby Awards. This live-action/animation project roped in Augenblick Studios and animator Chris Burns to bring the game of hangman to life. Congrats, gang!

Also, the Brothers McLeod are part of the creative team behind the winner of the Youth category. Their Flash-animated shorts in the Films section of the Tate Kids website helped push this project into the winner’s circle. We posted this back in November of 2008, but here’s the trailer one more time:

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 »

You may have already spotted this at CartoonBrew.com, but… Fran Krause created this :40 second signal film for the NYC-based 2008 Rooftop Films series. While he screens his films at night, by day Krause is a character designer at Augenblick Studios in Brooklyn.