Skills and Requirements:

2D character animation
Animates in Flash (drawing with a tablet)
Training in traditional, hand-drawn character animation
2+ years of professional experience

Please send resume and work samples/links to me – use the contact form here.

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.

[link]

My Adventures With Cloe is a new animated series aimed at adults created by Buddy Bolton and Chris Siemasko (this duo also created the series Boy Sheriff with the Fatkat gang). Cloe is a “pleasantly violent parody of a Saturday morning cartoon,” and while the animation isn’t the finest in town, the script really delivers the goods. The Fatkat team, based in New Brunswick, Canada, recently boarded a plane for Las Vegas for the NATPE event. Having just signed a distribution deal with the Just For Laughs group, they unfurled their new trade show booth and the My Adventures With Cloe pilot. They impressed the head writer for The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, and next they’re on to KidScreen in New York. So, settle in and enjoy the full 12-minute pilot episode (language NSFW).

The opening title cards of the first episode walk us through the ‘Squidbillies’ development stage.

SQUIDBILLIES PRODUCTION TIMELINE
“Squid” and “hillbillies” combined to make “Squidbillies”
Pilot made
Pilot revised
New Pilot made with 6 producers
(The number ’6′ then counts down to ’2′)
We like it!
Greenlit to Series
6 episodes ordered
20 episodes ordered
(the number ’20′ then counts down to 16)

Can’t say I’ve seen a show that recounted the rocky road it took to get to air even before a frame of animation goes by. Very clever.

‘Squidbillies’ feels like a late-nite, animation mixture of ‘Mr. Show’ and the Coen Brothers’ classic film ‘Raising Arizona,’ complete with what appears to be an homage to Nick Cage’s character – the show lead is named ‘Early’ Cuyler. And the humor is on par with ‘Arizona.’ In the first episode, titled ‘This Show is Called Squidbillies,’ the sheriff is in Early’s house getting a haircut, and he confronts Early’s sister, Lil, about what appears to be a moonshine rig:

SHERIFF
Did you know that moonshine is illegal here in this county?

LIL
Oh, that’s just my meth lab.

And Early’s mom, Granny, is confined to a home, but comes correct with unrestrained dialogue:

GRANNY
It’s God’s honest truth. When Jesus was president, he ate babies all the time.

It all goes by extremely fast, like most Adult Swim shows, so it’s almost imperative to watch this show repeatedly. You don’t want to miss Early’s sexual passion for pumpkins, the Space Baby, Early’s ‘Breathe if You’re Horny’ hat or the title cards at the end of the show that explain how graphic sex made it into the first episode.

If you missed last night’s show, you can check out a clip from an episode at the Adult Swim site.

You may already know that the ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force‘ creators, Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro have been hard at work preparing a theatrical version of ‘ATHF.’ But what you may not know is that this same duo has been called upon to create a second original show for Adult Swim – ‘Squidbillies.’ This project has actually been in the works (first announced in March 2004) for quite some time, but all signs point to a July 2005 release for this Flash-animated show set in the North Georgia mountains.

A ‘Squidbillies’ pilot aired back in November 2004, and you can get a glimpse of the show’s unique look by downloading two promo clips from the Adult Swim Fruitcake site. The loose, folk-art background style looks amazing, and the character design seems like a mixture of refrigerator art and ‘Beavis and Butthead.’

The original announcement at the 2004 upfronts gave the following synopsis of the show:

Five million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean covered North America all the way to the Ohio Valley. As the ocean receded to form our present-day geography, a family of squids was stranded in a remote setting in the North Georgia mountains. This motley melange of mischievous mollusks, influenced by the rural ways of the redneck locals, quickly “adapticise” to a world of fighting, feuding and fornicating with a Faulknerian flambé of ferocious sea creature livin’. The humor lies in the “adapticization.”