A teamed led by director Frank Drucker recently created a couple of animated commercials for Huggies, the disposable diaper. The two Flash-animated spots are for the Huggies Cleanteam products, and the project was produced by IBC Digital and Edgeworx. The music video, titled Reporting For Dirty, is currently playing in theaters in front of Horton Hears a Who and other family entertainment films.

The animation team features a handful of New York’s finest, including Mike Carlo, Dagan Moriarty, Matthew I. Jenkins, Sal Iovine, Soonmin Chung, Thomas Smolenski and Dan Forgione who also headed up the animation team.

Adam Sacks and David Cowles recently co-directed this multi-lingual animated short I Can Add, from the They Might Be Giants album/DVD Here Come The 123s.

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Sacks and Cowles had an A-list name of artists helping with the final animation, including Joe Apel, Pedro Delgado, Nelson Diaz, Jeff Fletcher, Aya Fukuda, Casey Leonard, Jonathan Renoni, Thomas Sebasian Smolenski, Joe Stucky and Joe Quinones.

Head over to Adam’s site to see the animatic (Quicktime) from I Can Add.

NBC’s hit online animated comedy Pale Force is back for a second season. The Flash-animated adventures of Conan O’Brien and comedian Jim Gaffigan return with more light-skinned shenanigans. The series has garnered nominations at the Daytime Emmys and the Webby Awards. New episodes will be launched every Monday at NBC.com. Here’s a sneak preview of the season premiere episode:

Gaffigan voices, co-writes and co-produces Pale Force with Paul Noth, who originally conceived the series. Animation is produced by Thomas Smolenski.

FlickerLab, the New York production, design and animation company, recently worked on a 30-second animation for the Virginia Lottery. The spot features the enigmatic Pink Panther, who was originally designed by the late Hawley Pratt - one of my favorite Golden Books illustrators.

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.

For more information on the project, head over to Animation Magazine.

The American Heart Association is dishing out healthy eating facts by way of a Flash animated short. The Bad Fat Brothers was conceived by the DC-based ad agency Porter Novelli, and they handed over the script to FlickerLab, who brought it life.

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.

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Jim Gaffigan is the funniest comedian on the planet. I’ve been following his work for years now, and I’ve even created a character in an animated series I’m developing with his voice in mind. Okay, it’s out there. Now we all know I’m extremely biased towards this story, but I’m not alone in thinking he’s funny. Conan O’Brien, the host of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, found Gaffigan’s animated ‘Pale Force’ pilot so funny, he decided to buy the property. It centers on a pair of pale superheroes that fight crime with the fair-skinned powers. Now NBC has ordered 20 Flash-animated episodes of the series, which will air Friday nights on Conan’s show, NBC.com and on video-enabled Sprint phones.

The series was co-created, directed and and written by Paul Noth, a cartoonist whose work has appeared in the The New Yorker. Jim and Paul teamed up with Kapara, an Israel-based studio, to produced the episode order. Ynetnews in Tel Aviv picked up the story and explained how Kapara ended up working alongside Gaffigan and Noth.

**** UPDATE ****

In fact, the 20 series run of ‘Pale Force’ is being animated by Thomas Smolenski, who worked on ‘Ellen’s Acres’ and ‘Kappa Mikey’ at Animation Collective, and Brett Hall, who both hail from New York.