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.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

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

[Show as slideshow]

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

Back in early 2006, CHF posted about The Mustache Contest, a Flash-animated short that wound up playing a The HBO Aspen Comedy Festival, the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival and the grandaddy of them all - Annecy.

Mike Hollingsworth, the animator and director of the short, recently teamed up with Fuel TV (Fox’s action sports network) to deliver a new animated series. Low Tide aired on Fuel TV’s Stupidface block, an hour-long collection of cartoons, parodies and sketch comedy. Here’s an episode titled Prom Dates.

Head over to MySpace to watch more episodes.

INTERspectacular, a concept, design and animation studio in New York City, has re-branded Nicktoons Network’s 3 Headed Monster block with new logos, graphics and animated bumpers. INTERspectacular’s Creative Directors Luis Blanco and Michael Uman teamed up with character designer Joel Trussell to create a 3-headed monster with distinct personalities: Friday, Saturday and Sunday (the block airs Fri-Sun from 7pm to 1am).

The design and animation team included Josh Pelzek, Devin Clark, Efrain Cintron, Euralis Weekes, Sybille Schenker, Alberto Cerriteno and Andrew Macfarlane. INTERspectacular Executive Producer Greg Babiuk tapped Blanco and Uman to voice the monsters. To see handfuls of animated bumpers, head over the INTERspectacular site and below is one titled Mirror.

Wrapping up Student Week here at Cold, Hard Flash, I’d like to introduce you to Shaun Bakkem-Reimers, a Flash animator up in Portland, Oregon. He’s attending Oregon State University, and his recent music video for the Portland’s The Punk Group has been gaining praise (and surely a few cold stares). According to an article in The Daily Barometer, Shaun started creating the video for ‘Fat Girls on Bicycles’ back in March of 2005. It’s not his first widely seen Flash project. A little over a year ago, Shaun added his ‘Bobby the Lizard Boy’ short to the growing list of Flash projects on the Nicktoons network.

We’re back with the second half of the Cold, Hard Flash interview with Campbell MacKinlay, the Director/Writer of ‘Doodlez,’ the short-form series currently airing on TeleTOON in Canada and Nicktoons in the States. Let’s see what Campbell has to say about alternatives to Flash, his work with Harry Knowles and which artists make him want to start doodling.

AARON: Beyond Flash, what other software does your team use to create ‘Doodlez’?
We compile our shows in Final Cut Pro, and run the final product through After Effects where we add a very slight blur in order to take a little bit of the digital edge off of everything. We try to do anything we can in order to avoid the dreaded “Flashy-ness.”

But truly, the entire production would grind to a halt were it not for one piece of software: Tetris.

AARON: Do you and your team use Flash to create the ‘Doodlez’ animatics?
CAMPBELL: Yes. Our pipeline runs almost exclusively through Flash. We have created interconnected template files for storyboards, animatics and layouts, so that each can be automatically populated by copy-pasting common symbols (and accepting the replacement) from the previous step.

As one might imagine, timing is a really important issue for the show, and it is one that is revisited throughout the process. As we timed out the animatics, we would often add antics and settles, by squashing and stretching the storyboard poses, which would result in a further defined blueprint to follow.

Also on the issue of timing, during the first season we found that the animators had a tendency to overrun the 2-minute episode limit, so that we had to create a final step in which we would need to cut the show to time.

As a result, in the second season, I would time the shorts out to 1 minute 45 seconds, leaving the animators a bank of 10 seconds to withdraw from as they needed, and myself 5 seconds more to fill out the show when it was complete. Adding time is a pleasure, while cutting is a nightmare, especially when the pacing of the show has such a tendency to add congestion.

AARON: Have you considered using any other vector-based software to animate ‘Doodlez?’
CAMPBELL: I think that any animation studio that hopes to survive needs to constantly keep their eyes and ears open. At Trapeze, we try to consider every viable option for getting our work onscreen. We don’t want to be left behind the curve, because of an allegiance to specific software, if something else appears that is superior to it. To this end, we’ve had a few conversations with Toon Boom at various stages about what their software can accomplish.

Until recently, Toon Boom’s product has not been compelling enough for us to consider making the change from Flash. However, we’ve recently had a demonstration of the capabilities of its newest iteration, Harmony, and were VERY impressed. Some of the features of this software quite simply blew us away.

But currently, its cost per seat is absurdly prohibitive, so it seems that we’ll have to be pinning all our hopes on the long-anticipated release of 8-ball for the time being. Hopefully, Flash has been paying attention to what its competitors and other vector-based programs such as Moho and Expression3 have been doing, and do their best to integrate similar features into this new release. Flash artists have waited a long time for an upgrade that focuses on our needs, so I certainly hope it’s worth it.

AARON: What’s the story behind those animated GIFs you did for Ain’t It Cool News?
CAMPBELL: The story is that I liked the site, and thought I saw an opportunity to contribute something. So I cooked up a quick animation of Harry with the little secondary Alien mouth (from Alien) popping out of his mouth and snapping.

He dug it, so I kept doing them and he kept posting them. When I stopped doing them I had completed 182 of them, a bunch of random illustrations, bumpers for the aintitcooltv pilot, and two animated shorts that opened the Butt-Numb-A-Thon 2 and 3 film festivals. Since I stopped, he’s just been cycling through the existing ones (though 3 or 4 were submitted by other guys).

AARON: What animators and artists do you draw inspiration from?
CAMPBELL: Most closely connected to inspiring ‘Doodlez’ are the folks behind the ‘Looney Tunes,’ (especially Clampett and Avery) and the DePatie-Freleng ‘Pink Panther,’ Antonio Prohias for ‘Spy Vs. Spy,’ and ‘La Linea,’ aka the line-guy featured on ‘The Great Space Coaster’ which was created by Osvaldo Cavandoli.

AARON: What animated programs are on your watch list?
CAMPBELL: ‘PEEP and the Big Wide World!’ Man, that’s a good show. My one year-old daughter hipped me to this show, but don’t discount it based on its preschool credentials. It’s sweet and simple, but very funny, with characters that are super-appealing and somehow manage to seem immediately familiar without ripping off anybody. Also, unless I am VERY mistaken, it’s Flash. (Editor: It is.)

AARON: Do you follow any Flash-animated web-series?
CAMPBELL: Sadly, I don’t. But around the time Icebox went down, I became too busy to keep track of much and tuned out. But, as I am not above this sort of thing, I will take this as an opportunity to plug the webisodes at jinglebelle.com and the corner animation I did for aintitcoolnews.com both of which were created exclusively in Flash, and mostly before I had the even the most remote idea of how to use the thing.

AARON: What animated DVDs are you currently playing?
CAMPBELL: Tom & Jerry, Ren & Stimpy, Samurai Jack, and Porco Rosso.

Beyond DVD, I recently traded for a 16th generation-VHS-copy of the John K. run on Mighty Mouse, which I am digging in a big, bad way.

AARON: Thanks, Campbell. I really appreciate your thoughtful answers and your inspirational work on ‘Doodlez.’ Best of luck with the upcoming episodes!

Last month I posted news of MTV Networks’ purchase of ‘Kappa Mikey,’ a Flash-animated anime spoof, for global distribution. The intention is to roll out the show on Nicktoons in the US and Nickelodeon Interenational (both under the MTV Networks umbrella) next year. The show, which was created by Animation Collective’s Larry Schwarz, focuses on “once-struggling American actor Mikey Simon as he adjusts to his new role as the biggest anime star Japan has even seen. But fame doesn’t come without a price.” On the heels of this news is the announcement that 4Kids Entertainment, the New York-based provider of children’s entertainment and merchandising, just picked up the the worldwide licensing, marketing and promotional rights for the show, which bodes well for Kappa Mikey’s future. Along with this recent press release comes some new show art, which feels reminicent of Comedy Central’s ‘Drawn Together,’ a show that marries various animation styles into one show. But now that I see the art, I’m starting to think that this show won’t be produced in Flash. The models, especially the anime-inspired characters, are fairly intricate, and might not be very Flash-friendly. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Nicktoons Film Festival has come to a close, and two of the eight finalists produced their work using Macromedia’s Flash software.

Robot Family: The Slick Salesman by Chris Harding

Just this morning, I posted my thoughts on this short. I completely agree with this short being included as a finalist - it’s a standout, and I’d love to see this series extend to a DVD compilation or a primetime show. Good luck, guys!

Kenya by Jonti Picking

Over a dozen shorts in the competition were animated in Flash. This comes as no surprise, as Flash has become one of the most commonly used production methods, especially for animated pilots. The program’s ease of use, flexibility and relatively low price tag (approx. $500) makes it a no-brainer for teams all around the world.

Congratulations to the creators of the festival winner, ‘Timmy’s Lessons in Nature,’ and the Producer’s Choice Award, ‘Welcome to My Life.’