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)

Fans of the groundbreaking 1982 Disney film Tron will get a kick out of this. Ron Doucet at Collideascope dug up some clips from their 2002 work on Teletoon’s series Ollie’s Under the Bed Adventures (now Olliver’s Adventures), and is using the material in his Flash animation class to teach special effects. The episode he chose from the series sees Olliver get sucked into his PC, where he’s dumped into the Tron universe. Here’s a few clips (no audio):

Head over to Ron’s original post to see heaps of model sheets, more effects clips, and if you watch closely you’ll also see a reference to the video game classic Q*Bert.[link]

Over on Allison Craig’s blog, I read about the latest Titmouse Inc. project - the Happy Monster Band. This is an original animated short-form series on Playhouse Disney, and it features a voting component. According to a press release, “starting October 12, preschoolers and their caregivers will be able to go online to vote for their favorite songs. The highest rated songs will be revealed on-air in a special Halloween Happy Monster Band Top Five Countdown.” Here’s a song titled I’m the Best at Being Me:

At the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, I attended the 5th Annual Pitching an Animated Show panel, which was again hosted by animation writer/creator Jon M. Gibson. The panelists covered topics that I’m sure many CHF readers are interested in (myself included), so I took some notes and will regurgitate here.

Heather Kenyon, the senior director of development of original animation for Cartoon Network, said that a good pitch should have strong characters - the type that could hold our attention in an episode taking place in an empty room. Kenyon said her studio has even optioned a show after seeing only evocative drawings of characters in action - displaying their personalities with crystal clarity.

This type of advice sounds obvious, as Eric Coleman, VP of Animation, Development & Production at Nickelodeon, pointed out, but they assured us that unique, vivid and likable new characters are hard to find. The mantra repeated by all panelists seemed to be “know your characters” and avoid the common trap of the main character being the least interesting one in the bunch. Again, this sounds obvious, but Jill Stewart, manager of Original Series at Disney Channel Animation, said that she hears many pitches where the lead character is introduced as “just a regular guy.”

Kenyon also added that a good exec will be reviewing you as well as the pitch. Knowing that you’ll be a pleasant person to work with goes a long way for these buyers, especially when you consider that development can take 2 or even 3 years. This is exactly how long it took to launch Nick’s El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera which was created by Sandra Equihua and her husband Jorge Gutierrez - also a panelist at the event.

Other words of wisdom heard on the panel included:

1. Write complete episode synopses - don’t just set up the story and cop out with “and the gang has to get out of another jam.”
2. Eric Coleman offered another seemingly obvious thought - that if you’re pitching a comedy your pitch should be, well, funny. The development execs on the panel said that they hear countless pitches claiming to be “funny like The Simpsons” but unless you can illustrate that in the room, they “won’t buy the show to see if that’s actually the case,” said Kenyon. I couldn’t agree more - and feel that if you’re not the type of person who makes your friends laugh, you might want to team up with a writer who does. My good pal Heath Corson, a talented comedy writer, could read the want ads in the pitch room and leave the meeting in stitches (ironically the same reason he doesn’t need to read the want ads).
3. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the level of pitch bible “frills” and the quality of the idea. Meaning that if your pitch pack for a treasure hunter show is delivered to a studio locked inside an elaborate chest of gold coins - you should have spent less time mining eBay for miniature treasure chests and more time ensuring you’ve created unique, likable characters. And aim for a low page count - six or seven pages.
4. Know both who you’re pitching to and what the network is broadcasting. If you’re not up to date on their current slate, take in some episodes or at least read some synopses on tv.com or similar site.
5. Gutierrez suggested that getting a job in the industry is a great way to grow towards a successful pitching career. He claimed to have been turned down in hundreds of pitch meetings before he and his wife Sandra cracked through with El Tigre. Coleman chipped in adding that he personally watched Jorge’s pitches improve over time - so stick with it and invite feedback from your friends.
6. It was also suggested to those outside of California that you pick up stakes and move to LA. Not exactly what you want to hear as you’re readying your pitch materials out in Vancouver or Austin, and I’m sure there’s plenty of success stories that offer hope to those outside of the LA bubble.
7. Don’t pitch your “baby” that’s been slowly crafted over the last 7 years - something Mike Moon, VP of animation at Disney Channel cautioned against. Gutierrez likened the pitch process to a battlefront - fearless pitching of concept after concept while your ideas are bombed into submission along the way. Bottom line - if you have one idea, you might just want to make that one yourself.
8. If you have access to the network execs, ask what they’re looking for (see below). Or wrap up your meeting with a chat about their current “wants.”

On that note, I’ll list out what the three represented studios are looking for, which tends to change a bit from year to year.

• Nickelodeon - Eric Coleman said they’re looking for comedy and kid heroes with breakout personalities. He said the ideal show will have kid or kid-like characters - ala Spongebob, who flips burgers (a first job) and is seeking his boating license (driver’s license).
• Cartoon Network - Heather Kenyon is after 6-11 boy-skewing shows, both action-adventure (think Ben 10) and comedies (think Camp Lazlo) alike. CN is also launching a Primetime block filled with animated sitcoms - like an age-appropriate Simpsons. Some will be live-action, some animated, while others will feature a mixture of both. For more insight on Cartoon Network’s development plans, check out this great post on Fatkat’s blog.
• Disney - Mike Moon kept his needs short and sweet: gender-neutral, kid-relatable and no action shows.

I encourage anyone mentioned above to correct or elaborate on what I’ve written, as I paraphrased a bit. And remember that these “rules” are broken en route to success, but it can’t hurt to soak this info in before embarking on a pitch tour.

Disney’s Shorty McShorts’ Shorts keeps on blast out new projects, and I can hardly keep up. So here’s several, starting with The Imperfect Duplicates of Dodger Dare, the creation of my friend Andy Suriano, a fellow Michigander. The voice of Beauty is performed by Lisa Loeb, and Andy, who boasts plenty of improv experience, played several roles as well.

The animation was produced by Copernicus Studios in Canada. These guys are real pioneers in the animation world, and are producing perhaps the best Flash work on the planet right now. If you squint your eyes you can see the pencil crayon strokes they uses for the character outlines - a painstaking approach that delivers a cartoon look not often found in Flash productions. You can tell that Murray Bain, the art director at Copernicus, and his co-workers have really benefited from their collaborations with John K. They work pose-to-pose throughout Dodger Dare, which gives their work a more traditionally animated feel.You can also download that for your iPod.Next up is Mascot Prep, the creation of Chip Wass, who also created the designs for Shorty McShort Short himself. Boulder Media in Ireland produced the Flash animation.
And lastly is Flip Flopped, a show I believe was produced in Flash (help, anyone?). What I do know is that the voice of the Dad was played by Jeff Garlin, one of my favorite actors, and the co-star of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

In a way, William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is about going it alone. As most of us know, the story follows two star-crossed lovers who decide to follow their passion, despite having no support from the embattled establishment (their families). This is also Phil Nibbelink’s tale - one of a ex-Disney man, who follows his dream of making animated feature films. In early 2003, with no help from the studio system, he summoned up his strength, chose a software and set off to make his vision come alive.

The result of Phil’s work, a 4 1/2 year journey, is a 77-minute Flash-animated feature film - ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss.’ He drew the entire feature himself, all 112,000 frames of it, on a Wacom tablet, right into Flash. But he didn’t stop drawing there - last weekend he sat in the lobbies of two cinemas and drew Romeo & Juliet sketches for 600 children. And now, as his 5-year journey comes to a close, Phil will watch his feature film receive a theatrical release, beginning on October 27th throughout the Los Angeles area. It’s a remarkable story of individual achievement, and one that I know will have a better ending than Shakespeare’s classic version.

Have a look at the trailer, and then below Phil answers a few questions for CHF.

AARON SIMPSON: Was ‘Romeo & Juliet’ your sole project through these last 5 years?
PHIL: ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss’ was the only thing I’ve worked on for the last 5 years. I worked around the clock 24/7 trying to finish before my savings ran out. But I have 4 small children who needed to be played with so I used them as my test audience and we’d have daily focus groups to discuss story points and whether or not gags were working.

AARON: At any point during the production, did the end seem out of reach?
PHIL: In order to reach my goal, I had to make 100 drawings, 5 seconds of film or complete 2 shots a day. As long as I hit one of those marks everyday I knew I was on schedule. And I wouldn’t go to bed until I had.

AARON: In the beginning, what was the common reaction when you explained what you were setting out to do?
PHIL: Well, everybody thought that I was a ‘mad man!’ They probably still do. But I worked for so long in the big studio environment that I just got sick and tired of the merry-go-round. So much money and time is wasted going in circles and having endless meetings and making useless changes. I kept saying to myself, “this would go faster if I just did it myself.” And it did - I proved it!

AARON: Did you develop any repetitive motion disorders on your way to completing 112,000 drawings?
PHIL: I had to wrap a kneaded erasure around the Wacom stylus to prevent callouses forming on my fingers. When we had to go somewhere, my wife drove and I did ink and paint in the car on a laptop with a graphics tablet. That bought me more time and relieved any repetitive motion disorder.

AARON: Was there much edited out in this final cut?
PHIL: No. I had a real clear vision of the movie. Working alone allowed me the luxury of starting at the beginning of the film and animating straight ahead. I could watch the movie from the start right up to where I just finished and it was very clear then what had to be animated next.

AARON: Had you worked with Flash prior to ‘Romeo & Juliet?’
PHIL: I hadn’t worked with Flash before. Prior to ‘Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss,’ I animated two movies on my own - ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Lief Ericson: The Boy Who Discovered America.’ Those films were animated on an Amiga using Deluxe paint at video resolution. I thought if I could get my work on 35mm I could reach a wider audience. So I explored a lot of options. I concluded that drawing on paper would add the extra steps of inking and painting or scanning. As a one-man-band, I had to look for ways to cut steps out of the process. I looked at all the animation software and concluded that 2K files don’t play back in real time on small cheap computers. So I had to go vector.

I bought a film recorder from Upgrade Technologies because I figured it was cheaper to shoot it myself than pay a service. I shot a 2K test at 2048×1234x24bit BMP’s with Flash, and nervously projected it up on the big screen. I was blown away with the perfect line quality, no jaggies, no rastering, no banding in the gradients - just perfect flat colors and sub-pixel antialiasing in the slow camera moves. OK, maybe the super slow rotations staggered a bit, but that was something I could see happen in real-time on the computer and I could easily correct it. So Flash 4 was it and I hit the ground running and never looked back.

AARON: Is that the version you used throughout the production?
PHIL: I used Flash 4 the whole production.

AARON: Did you rely on much re-use in your Flash scenes?
PHIL: When I tried to migrate to Flash 5 it created forward-compatibility problems. Being a one-man-band, I have to cut a lot of corners. And re-using animation is a huge time saver. So an animation created in Flash 5 couldn’t be opened in Flash 4 without a fight. Yes, there are cut and paste work arounds using Flash 4 and Flash 5 launched at the same time but that created RAM issues and crashes. So screw it! I just stuck with Flash 4. And besides, I couldn’t afford the upgrades and they really weren’t adding more art tools.

AARON: What feature is most lacking in Flash that would have helped your production?
PHIL: Defocusing, invertible masks, and that irritating pop from bitmap line to vector line would have helped.

AARON: What type of scene did you turn to Moho for?
PHIL: The slowest thing in production was inbetweening. Moho, now called Anime 4, allows you to take an Illustrator file from Flash and rig it with bones to create very organic squash and stretch movement. This was perfect for the “over-the-shoulder” or the “listening” characters, or keeping crowd scene characters alive. Then I could export a SWF vector animation that imports into Flash. With experience I found I could create hybrid animation. I would hand-animate a character in Flash moving wildly into a pose and then animate the moving hold with Moho. With very little effort I could make seamless transitions from one to the other and get through the shot a lot faster.

When it came time to sell ‘Romeo & Juliet,’ I was told by distributors that there “wasn’t enough 3D in the movie” and that “2D is dead.” So I’m hoping to prove that there is still a family audience out there that loves fully-animated, hand-drawn films.

Read more from Phil in the Cold Hard Flash message boards.