This week, Fran and I were interviewed for the Frenzer Foreman Animation forum. I just listened to the episode, and I was surprised to learn that Fran and I sound totally different. Nobody ever told me that we don’t have twin voices! Also, I goofed on the identity of Baby Bear’s puppeteer. Sorry, Baby Bear.

Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum

A music video that Fran and I made for Miles Kurosky is up on the internet this week. Hooray! I can finally show you all some pictures and video!

Amid Amidi did a ‘lil writeup on Cartoon Brew over here: Cartoon Brew

Fran is a big Beulah fan, so when we made The Upstate Four he contacted Miles Kurosky to see if he would be interested in making some music for our cartoon. Even though we couldn’t pay them too much, Miles and his friend Nik Freitas wrote and recorded 25 songs for our cartoon. Really really good songs! If my computer’s music player is on shuffle and one of them pops up it is never skipped and often repeated.

We offered to make him a music video so that our exchange of goods and services would be more fair, and Fran proposed that our music video should require that all of the check boxes on an animation festival application form for “Media type” be checked. (We missed sand-on-glass and paint-on-glass, but there’s still quite a bit of stuff in the soup.)

Fran and I started out thinking that our video would be a weekend project like Robot Dance Party, but it was so much fun to try new things that it expanded into our free time over several months.

We made puppets, set construction paper houses on fire (which lit up quite nicely!) and had lots of fun along the way. Our video has played the ASIFA-East Festival, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, and it will be at Stuttgart this May.

Here’s the finished project for which I made all of those cardboard props! Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata helped take the pixellated photos of the props and costumes, and even helped out by wearing them. When I brought everything into After Effects, I had to scale Max and Ru horizontally to make them chubby enough for animation!

The rain was made by gluing construction paper raindrops to some string, and cycling through three different strands of drops (purple, light blue, and dark blue.

And here’s what those things look like when they’re moving:

I’m making an interstitial for the Sundance Channel. All of the spots are themed to days of the week, and I was chosen for “Monday.” I’ll be using these props and costume pieces to make a short segment where a grandfather clock character steals peoples’ timepieces. I made most of the items out of scraps of cardboard, matboard, and wire.

Here’s some concept backgrounds for a Clambake Animation Studio pilot called “Southies.”

I had some fun with the newspaper headlines on this one.

I did some character design for a change – the cave painting versions of the Superjail staff.

Chinatown was so much fun to draw!!

The jungle plants and giant bugs were plenty of fun to draw.

Refrencing Peter Max and Miyazaki in one episode? Hooray!