The Cold Hard Flash Store just received a shipment of John K t-shirts, all screen-printed on high-quality t-shirt blanks (that’s how they say it in the t-shirt industry – *ahem*) like American Apparel brushed-cotton tees. Don’t believe us – have a look at this Flash-animated promo short.

We enlisted the help of Mike Pataki, the voice-acting legend who plays George Liquor, to ensure that our shirts don’t cause muscle decay. As you can see from this photo, Mike’s muscles are alive and well, and ready to join John K in future George Liquor voice record sessions.

If you order a shirt, rest assured that a professional fulfillment company will be handling your order. At one point, I did have the shirts strewn around my living room, but they’re now safely stored in an Texas warehouse, awaiting your credit card confirmation.

Which one’s your favorite?

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.

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.

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)

El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, a Flash-animated show that airs on Nickelodeon, leads all TV series with 4 nominations, including a nod for Best Animated Television Production and an individual nomination for Jorge R. Gutierrez, the co-creator of the series. It should also be noted that 2 of the other 4 nominees in the Best Production category are also Flash-produced – Peep and the Big Wide World and Little Einsteins (which also utilizes After Effects).

Next, John Kricfalusi, a true pioneer in online Flash animation, will be receiving a Windsor McCay Award for his series The Ren & Stimpy Show and “use of artist-driven Flash animation.”

Lastly, Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, the creators of Flash, will receive the Ub Iwerks technical achievement award.

I’ve already marked my calendar – and can’t wait to trumpet Flash at stateside animation’s biggest night.

Unrelated to Flash news – my cousin, Elizabeth Harvatine, was nominated in the Character Animation category for her stop-motion work on Moral Orel. Go Liz!

But before we make our orders, we want to do one last check with our faithful readers. If you have a second, take a look at the shirts below, and “vote” for your favorites. This will make sure we order the right amounts (or don’t order some of them).

Joel Trussell, the brilliant designer and artist from Tennessee was featured in the Metro Pulse, the Knoxville weekly. They discuss his recent short for Yo Gabba Gabba!, his rise to web fame with War Photographer, and his fear of Flash games. Click here to read.

Tom Neely, who was featured here in 2005 for his Muffs music video, has been having one helluva year. His graphic novel The Blot has found a great deal of critical success, then the Black Maria Gallery in Glendale put on a one-man show, titled Self Indulgent Werewolf, of his painting and sculptures. Even in his still work, Neely can’t help but animate. Click here to read his interview at the LAist.

Gene Fowler, the top dog at Fatkat, won BDC’s (Business Development Bank) Young Entrepreneur Award for New Brunswick. The press release features a brief interview with Fowler. Click here to read.

There’s also been some echoes of a Flash-related dust-up that started over at Cartoon Brew.

Pete Emslie continues to berate Flash as the cause of bad animation.

And John Kricfalusi posted a thoughtful reply to Emslie and claims that if it’s Overseas vs. Domestic Flash – he’ll take Flash any day.

***** UPDATE *****

Here’s one t-shirt in progress.

WATCH THE COMCAST COMMERCIAL IN HI-RES (Quicktime – 18 mb)

OR LOWLY YOUTUBE QUALITY:

The LOG commercial from The Ren and Stimpy Show

Sure enough it was 2 1/2 minutes long.

The Goodby team had explicit orders from Comcast not to let the commercial be longer than 1:15, so we all worked together to cut it down. It was hard to do, because there was more funny stuff in it.

I decided to make it as candy-like and happy as possible visually, because it is a bit cynical if you just listen to the message.

AARON: Who did the character designs and backgrounds?
JOHN: I got Rex Hackelberg, the king of happy design, to create the characters and then I did most of the posing and layouts.

AARON: What type of direction did you give Rex as he set out to design the characters?
JOHN: I sent him my storyboard, and said draw funny kid characters and a bored middle aged man in a 3 headed dinosaur suit.

He sent me tons of doodles and made it very hard for me to choose. There were so many great ideas for the dinosaur suit that I mixed and matched the parts I liked most and probably ruined his style!

I didn’t have to “direct” him to do designs in his own style. My new working method is possible because of the internet. When you have an actual studio in a certain city, your talent pool is limited to who lives there and is available. I have to train a lot of artists to learn my style, system and methods. That costs a lot of money, takes time and it frustrates the artists who don’t get it. Their frustrations pass on by osmosis to the artists who do get it.

Now I can work with people whose styles already fit with mine or I can discover people on the blogs whose styles and skills I like. We get to try things that neither of us might have thought of on our own by mixing up our styles and techniques.

Brian Romero, on his own, inked up some Sody poses I did and sent them to me awhile ago. They were great! He kept all the organic sexy lines around her and didn’t lose the flair of the originals. Inking and cleaning up stylish animation drawings without blanding them out is a very rare skill. The whole animation studio system is geared to ruin individual flair and they actually train everyone to kill everything. I usually have to spend money untraining artists whose natural spirit the evil studios have destroyed.

Online I can find talented artists that have not been killed by the system. Or they find me!

The project goes a lot smoother and there is less direction for me and more fun for all.

AARON: Who painted the background designs?
Kali Fontecchio painted the most colorful background cards.

AARON: What type of art direction did you offer Kali before she started painting the BGs?
JOHN: I told her to read my blog posts on color and do exactly what they say to do, and don’t do what they say not to do. I like unusual colors that evoke mood or are just plain fun.

“Every brush stroke should be pretty”
“No primaries next to secondaries”
“No pink, purple and green”
“No pee and poo colors.”

AARON: The voice actors sound familiar. Who did you bring in to voice it?
JOHN: I hired 2 great voice talents: Gary Owens (Roger Ramjet, Space Ghost, Powdered Toast Man) and Eric Bauza (El Tigre, Ren & Stimpy, The Ripping Friends) to do very fun readings and that added a lot.

My whole goal was to create a light happy jovial feel.

AARON: How long did it take to produce?
JOHN: A month. That’s about 10 times faster than any commercials I have ever done for TV.

I have a new streamlined system that saves a lot of time and overhead and I get to work with top people only.

AARON: What was the most difficult aspect of the spot?
JOHN: Cutting out some funny side gags and bits to make it fit into the time. That’s always difficult!

AARON: What’s up with that unusual aspect ratio?
JOHN: I’m not sure. That’s the format Comcast wanted. Kelsie suggested we put curtains on either side and just put the cartoon in the middle, but I thought, “what the heck, let’s see if we can just do it wide.” It’s a bit awkward, but I like to try new things.

AARON: Did you draw inspiration from any classic cartoons for this piece?
JOHN: I know you set that up. Of course, all the Hubley commercial posts are the inspiration, as they were for LOG.

It doesn’t look exactly like those great commercials and if we tried to just imitate it accurately of course we’d fail.

The style of all my cartoons is the sum total of what the individual artists and talents bring to it.

That’s why I encourage everyone to take advantage of the fact that I don’t have a preset notion of what every detail should be. Break out of the studio chains and make something up!

AARON: How does this effort compare to your recent Raketu project?
JOHN: It’s definitely different. The Comcast commercial doesn’t use my existing characters and it’s not a personality driven cartoon. It’s meant to sell Comcast’s wares and be really fun visually.

The idea behind Raketu was to give the impression that different people in a family have individual uses for each of it’s features. Comcast is aiming at the parents, but pretending not to…

Also we smoothed out some bugs in the production system this time and we were able to make a more elaborate spot in less time.

I have to point out, it sure looks this TV network studio system is doomed. They can’t keep up with all the natural changes technology and the internet is allowing us to take advantage of.

The blog community of artists is the greatest thing yet. All of a sudden there are thousands of cartoonists who – despite whatever minor differences we may have, they are nothing compared to the shared experiences we have in being creatively stifled by the studios.

I’m hoping that this new world will bring actual animation back to our shores and with that, creative growth and fun for the artists and the audience.

AARON: Which artists animated the spot?
JOHN: Eric Pringle and Kristen McCormick were my 2 main Flash animators, but I managed to get Will Finn to animate an old fashioned drawn scene and that was great to work with him.

And now a few questions for Eric and Kristen, two animators who also work on Cartoon Network’s Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends.

AARON: Eric, You’ve animated a great deal of John K’s Flash work – dating back to the Spümcø days.
ERIC PRINGLE: I animate way differently now. When I first started at Spümcø I didn’t know how to animate at all. Also, the way we set up our files has evolved tremendously. We weren’t hip to comps (nested timelines) and everything was animated on the mainstage. We still used instances but it was really archaic the way we were doing it back when. It’s funny how we clung to our methods claiming them as “Flash secrets.” Looking back on those files I’m really embarrassed. Now that I am slightly more confident in my animation, I know how to set eases on my tweens and I don’t feel compelled to antic-overshoot-settle all the time. I still seek advice from John, Craig Kellman, and Matt Danner because I still have a lot to learn and need some slapping around every once and a while.

AARON: Does this type of animation differ from a TV series?
ERIC: Totally. On the TV series that I’ve worked on, everything is stock digital puppets with a few special poses here and there. On the Comcast commercial nothing is stock – John drew layouts for everything. I enjoy working with layouts a lot more, the poses tend to be stronger and more organic. Working with stock it’s always a matter of trying to Frankenstein a pose together, like getting the correct hand from the library to fit the pose, “eh, it’s the wrong angle, hopefully no one will notice.” However, for me, working with layouts makes the turnaround time much longer; maybe I’m just not accustomed to that kind of process anymore. From my experiences working with both layout and stock pipelines in Flash, working with stock is the best way of going about making a TV series. Layouts require too much clean up and rigging that would most likely bottleneck somewhere in the production. Though the quality is better with layouts, it is just not economical for the demands of the studios with tight budgets and tighter schedules, especially when competing with overseas shops. But for a short, like the Comcast commercial, it’s totally the way to go. What was the question again?

KRISTEN MCCORMICK: I agree! Working for John K is different that any work I have ever done. Each project he does requires a different approach. He won’t let you use any formulas you’re used to. He hates formulas! I often start on a John K animation project animating a certain way, the way I am used to. It usually ends up being completely the wrong way, and by the end am doing something totally different, something that I would never have thought of. I always learn a lot.

AARON: This spot appears to be an homage to Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil cartoons. Did you use any reference/inspiration for timing and movement for your animation?
ERIC: I’ve actually never watched Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil before but I did notice the resemblance when I started on the project. For some of the scenes of the commercial, John told me I should reference some of Clampett’s Looney Tunes for the timing. Along with referencing Looney Tunes, I’m always referencing Foster’s, since I look at it everyday. Some of the animators on the crew have some really interesting techniques that can be really helpful.

KRISTEN: I started working on this Comcast project a little late, so I was inspired by the awesome animation that had been already done by Pringle. But I had been thinking about the recent posting John had done on the Hubley salt commercial such beautiful animation. And such great use of timing. John wanted me to look back at the animation Copernicus had done on the Tenacious D video. They did some amazing work that is very humbling and inspiring to study.

KRISTEN: He tries to be very thorough in his direction, acting it out, making timing notes or quick sketches for where the actions should happen. After taking the first pass on the animation I get a lot more direction. Their are usually several retake sessions on any given shot, especially early on I have to unlearn the typical way I do things.

AARON: The aspect ratio is so wide and atypical. Did that present any challenges?
ERIC: It sure did. John drew everything in standard def (16:9 ratio), and I had animated most of the shots in standard. We didn’t find out what the ratio was until halfway through the production. John improvised and added drawings to most the shots to fill the space and also broke one of the shots up into an assortment of vignettes that covered the wide ratio. He described this shot as one of those dumb things Disney used to do. It wasn’t too hard, for me anyway, to make the switch from standard to extra wide. I think it all worked out.

KRISTEN: My part of the project didn’t really get affected too much by that. After I was done animating, some of the drawings got modified. Also editing and other really cool things were done to make better use of the unique shape of the screen.

AARON: Compared to your Spümcø work, do you animate any differently now or use any new tricks?
ERIC: Everyday I’m learning some kind of new shortcut that makes lives easier. On the Comcast commercial I used some shape tween methods we use on Foster’s. After setting the shape tween, I keyframe it out and use the layer frame distributor plug-in and then export the FLA (Flash file) to an Illustrator file and apply the art brushes and import that stuff back into flash. I did that with the dinosaur’s neck and the dog’s nose animation. Also I used the tween2keys plug-in to eliminate some of the tweeny animation in some of the shots, but that’s not really a trick. For the vibrating fx on the burst and weird shapes I just made some shape tweens and then clicked the smooth tool a few times to slightly distort the shapes on each frame. Other than that stuff, I didn’t do anything other than slide John’s drawings into each other and hope for something nice.

AARON: Thanks everyone. For more on the Comcast spot, head over to John K’s blog and check out his posts.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Character Design
Rex Hackelberg

Animation
Eric Pringle
Kristen McCormick
Leo Riley
Greg Franklin
Will Finn

Inks
Brian Romero
Corbett Vanoni

Background Designs
Kali Fontecchio

Voices
Gary Owens
Eric Bauza
Deneo Harris
Kelsie Van Deman
Amy Maloof

Production Coordinator
Marc Deckter

Production Assistant
Joe Henderson