A big thanks to animator/illustrator Thomas Sebastian Smolenski for the story tip.

Creative Director Harold Moss oversaw the design and animation team, which included Phil Lockerby, Simon Ampel, David Michael Friend, Frank Digregorio, Max Porter, Craig Wilson, Micah Cohen, Pedro Davies, Will Pittas, Jeff Lee, Anand Duncan and Rachel Hoffman.

Thanks to Christopher Siemasko for the tip.

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.

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

The Finkel Files

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

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.

Written by Comedy Central Senior writer Lesley Keene, the commercial started airing on Comedy Central in early December. Harold Moss acted as the Creative Director on the project, and by Animation Director Nikolay Nachev and Frank DiGregorio, who helped on the 2D animation.

The project originated out of +SmithGifford, a full-service advertising agency based in Virginia. They invited FlickerLab to participate in the scripting, storyboarding and design of the project, which will be screened in Virginia theaters starting August 6th. To bring the spot to life, the FlickerLab team utilized Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Cintiq monitors. The production team included animator Thomas Smolenski, who has been featured here before for his work on NBC’s Pale Force.

The New York animation and design studio utilized Flash, Photoshop and After Effects, and Apple Final Cut Pro in producing this short about the pitfalls of eating trans fats and saturated fats.

The Flash animation team included Nikolay Nachev, Phil Lockerby, Nicholas Bertonazzi, Frank Digregorio, Anand Nunnally-Duncan, Simon Ampel, Tom Smolenski and Chris Siemasko.

Siemasko has been mentioned several times here before, and most recently as the co-creator of My Adventures With Cloe. Smolenski is no stranger to CHF either, having been mentioned for his animation work on Pale Force. Ampel animated on Queer Duck: The Movie.

[link]

Most animated programs on TV are produced by relatively large teams. It’s not unusual for a program to have upwards of 75 people working in some capacity on a project. A cursory Google search turned up these facts: ‘Sitting Ducks,’ the 3D-animated show hosted 64 employees, while ‘Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi’ is created with a 40-person production crew.

Now imagine a crew of one.

That crew is Jennifer Shiman, and she is currently working with the cable network STARZ! to produce a series of 30-second spoofs of Hollywood movies, all reenacted by Flash-animated bunnies. ’30-Second Bunnies Theatre’ was already an internet sensation, drawing over 25,000 viewers a day, and then the Starz Entertainment Group came hopping along. Now Jennifer has moved up to the big time, without adding a big time crew.

It’s a testament to Jennifer’s well-rounded skills – she writes, storyboards, voices and animates each short from her home studio. The animation medium has always been inviting to auteurs who want to do it all, but with Flash the possibilities are even greater. With Flash’s low barrier to entry (cost and ease-of-use) and it’s penchant for low-bandwidth delivery, animators can do quick work and then quickly get it in front of a huge audience.

And that’s what Jennifer did. In the halcyon days of the dotcom boom, she was steadily working in Hollywood as a multimedia designer and animator, occasionally pitching a project or two around town and updating her website. Three years later, she pieced together a 30-second reenactment of ‘The Exorcist,’ and in place of Linda Blair and Max von Sydow, Jennifer inserted animated bunnies. And just like that, Jennifer had ushered a hot new show concept into the digital world without scheduling a single pitch meeting.

Since then, she’s been invited to the 2004 Ottawa International Animation Festival, where her ‘The Shining’ short took first place in the ‘Internet Series’ category; she’s been interviewed by G4 TV; the writers of ‘X2: X-Men United,’ Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris, chipped in voices in one of her shorts; her ‘Titanic’ spoof was screened on ‘Good Morning America’ and this same short is reportedly going to be included on the upcoming ‘Titanic’ Special Edition DVD this October; and of course, Jennifer landed her STARZ! TV deal. Not bad for 30-seconds.

Cold, Hard Flash recently passed on a set of questions to Jennifer, which, ironically, she answered with the help of a 60 person crew.

AARON SIMPSON: So you’re really a crew of one?
JENNIFER SHIMAN: I do everything from concept development to implementation, except additional voices (friends and cohorts help me out) and post-production, such as laying off the Flash-exported file to tape or film.

AARON: I’d guess there’s not another TV series on the air with such a small production team. Do you ever see a need to expand?
JENNIFER: I’m asking myself that question now. In various capacities I am going to need help soon, and I’m ruminating on how to go about getting it (and, where extra help will be most helpful).

AARON: Do you create animatics before you begin animating your ‘Bunnies’ shorts?
JENNIFER: No I don’t. I do run through a bunch of versions of thumbnail storyboards though. And by “thumbnail storyboard” I mean an indecipherable scrawl of half-notes, lists and pictures in my notebook.

AARON: As you animate new episodes, do you find any opportunities to re-use assets from previously animated ‘Bunnies’ shorts?
JENNIFER: Absolutely, I try to re-use assets whenever it makes sense. For instance, I have a library of bunny mouths and certain background elements such as clouds, light fixtures, doorknobs. These assets still need adapting, depending on e.g. the line thickness of the scene in which I use them. But they do save time.

AARON: Describe how you got the bunnies from inside the Flash program out onto tape and ready for TV?
JENNIFER: On my end, I work within a reticle/action-safe template that I found on Flickerlab.com’s great tutorial on using Flash for output to broadcast. AndrewProkos.com had great tips too. Then I export the .FLA movie to a hi-res Quicktime Video, which is usually 700-900MB in size (I work on a Macintosh, by the way). I compress the exported QT video using DropStuff and upload it via FTP to a server where the Starz people can download it, unstuff it and plop it into e.g. Final Cut Pro (I work at 15 frames per second, and they covert the frame rate and lay it off to tape over there).

AARON: Did you have to re-build any of your Flash assets in order to make your short films TV-ready?
JENNIFER: I did need to make adjustments, for example, I created a few of my first re-enactments at the Flash default size, 550 x 400 pixels. When Starz licensed those particular ones, they needed them sized at 720 x 486 pixels for their broadcast purposes. So I needed to place the entire re-enactment within a movieclip and resize it accordingly on a 720 x 486 stage (and adjust any animation to fit within action-safe boundaries). Then I had to make sure all movieclip instances of animation had been changed to graphic instances, so they’d appear animated when I exported to Quicktime video. Additionally, I had to be careful of the color palette I use, to avoid having colors appear shockingly bright on TV.

AARON: How did you celebrate when your ‘Bunnies’ shorts first aired on STARZ!?
JENNIFER: I whooped with glee! Then I sat down at the desk and got back to work.

AARON: Any chance we’ll start seeing ‘Bunnies’ merchandise on the shelves?
JENNIFER: I already have bunnies and other angryalien merchandise available via my website Â? I use the proceeds to offset bandwidth costs. Eventually I’d like to expand the merchandise offerings though.

AARON: Is it safe to say you’ve learned the intricacies of parody and fair use legprecedentent?
Indeed!

That’s it for the first part of the Cold, Hard Flash interview with Jennifer Shiman, the creator of ’30-Second Bunnies Theatre.’ Check back soon for part 2.