Andy Coyle recently posted the updated Space Knights title sequence on his blog. The project, which was initiated at Fatkat, was selected to be part of The Detour on TELETOON Pilot Project, as we announced here almost exactly a year ago. The team produced 2 episodes that comprised the pilot, and Coyle and his friends Jon, Tavis and Pat worked on this intro.

[We've removed this video for now - we'll update you when it's available again]

Fatkat Animation Studios’s work has been featured here at least a few dozen times, so it’s with heavy heart that we announce their demise. Over at the Fatkat blog you can read how it all went down, and Cartoon Brew is also reporting on the story.

The response around the web is expected – venom mixed with sadness – but from where I sit, that’s less animation jobs and I never like to report on that. I hope everyone up there finds work soon and congrats on a great run.

For more on Fatkat, read our interview with founder Gene Fowler, who is reportedly starting a new studio called Loogaroo.

Alright – here we go again.

Last week, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy and American Dad, was on The Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio to promote The Cleveland Show. The conversation eventually steered towards Stern’s own latent cartoon ambitions. You see, back about 5 years ago, Stern was cooking up a series for Spike titled Howard Stern: The High School Years. Well into development, Howard ran into some budget problems. Spike reportedly wasn’t interested in paying $800,000 or a million per episode for traditional animation – ala Family Guy – so they started down the Flash route, or what Stern calls “cheap shit animation.” In last week’s interview, MacFarlane remarked on this production choice and subsequently pissed all over Flash (listen here – around 8:00):

There’s something so sanitized when they do it with Flash. There’s still no machine that can substitute for hand drawn. Some people like it. I have the same visceral reaction that you do. It just feels very cold.

To illustrate how ridiculous this comment is, I direct your attention to a Flash-animated project – one that MacFarlane may recognize:

How cold! How sanitized! The animators must have been replaced by robots! That was Up Late With Stewie & Brian, which was produced in Flash by Flinch, Zeek and Fatkat back in 2007.

There’s not accounting for taste, as it’s a personal thing, but Seth has bumbled into the same old mistake so many others have made – he blamed bad painting on the brush. It’s quite apparent that Seth hasn’t seen the volumes of excellent work produced with the Flash thoughtout the years. Go watch Superjail! or some of the work we highlighted in the Flash Animation 10, and you’ll agree it’s not the tool that’s sanitizing anything.

You can actually see the test Stern is referring to. In November of 2003, Mark Marek met with Stern and subsequently produced some animated tests, hoping to land the directing gig. He posted the results on his site, which don’t look all that bad to me.

Big thanks to Dave Redl (Family Pants) for the story tip.

The Fatkat crew in Miramichi, New Brunswick have been hard at work on a new Flash-animated series that is set to start production later this year. It’s titled Leo & the Pisa Gang, and it was created by Winfried Debertin – the guy who created the European series Little Amadeus. So the show had that decidedly European look, but it’s produced almost “traditionally” in Flash. The demo below was produced by Robbie Anderson and directed by Tavis Silbernagel.

Animation Collective and Fatkat Studios have teamed up to deliver a new Flash-animated series for Nicktoons Network. The 26-episode order of Three Delivery premieres this Friday at 7:30, and it’s also slated for YTV and the BBC.

The show, which features 3 Kung-Fu teens who deliver fresh food and fists of fury, features a traditionally animated look, which isn’t the common approach for TV series produced in Flash.

Here’s short clip from an episode:

These clips below are selected action and effect shots from the production, animated by folks like Jon Lambe, Melanie Albert, Matt Taylor, Jeff Davis and Neven Nesic, and overseen by Robert Keith Anderson, one of the animation supervisors.

Click on the thumbnails below so see some background layouts from the series production:

Lastly, let’s hear from some of the artists and production staff who worked out of the Miramichi-based studio:

It’s a rare occurrence to be able to animate in a traditional style in Canada in a Flash environment, and I find that it forces me to apply all the art and animation techniques I’ve learned over the years.
-Tavis Silbernagel – Director, Three Delivery, Fatkat

Anything worth doing in life is hard and this show is no exception. Long days, cold nights, the hard but worthwhile fights. At the end of the day it all comes together with final picture and sound and you pick yourself up off of the dirty floor and shake off the discarded candy wrappers that you used as a blanket and say, “yes, that’s the show we wanted to make.”
-Robbie Anderson – VP of Production, Fatkat

Three Delivery has been one of the best opportunities I’ve had in the animation business to do something truly different. The characters are believable and easy to sympathize with and the artwork doesn’t follow the usual rules of geometric shapes and bright colors.
-Alan Foreman, Art Director, Three Delivery, Animation Collective

Three Delivery is proof that you can traditionally animate an entire long format series in flash, and that you can do it here in North America with studios like AC and Fatkat.
-Gene Fowler, President, Fatkat