Milton and Dupree

While I was working at Wildbrain, my friend and co-worker Amanda introduced me to the GoSuperego Comedy Podcast. It's mainly two guys, Matt and Jeremy, with a bunch of their friends and guests doing improv characters. Check them out on itunes. I love their stuff and I literally fell out of my chair laughing a few times, but mostly because the chair was screwy. Two of their characters, Milton and Dupree, really had me laughing. It's supposed to be 2 Vaudeville guys who tell offbeat bad jokes and then cheerfully insult each other. Most of the time it seems to be Matt and Jeremy trying to crack each other up. At the end of the Superego second season, they were asking if any animators were interested in animating to their podcast. I emailed Matt in early September and he sent me 4 of the Milton and Dupree sketches. I wrote them out in longhand and then figured out which bits I wanted to use. I edited them together using Audacity and Garageband into a 2 minute piece. Right at the beginning I knew that I wanted to do something visual to add to it and that didn't reveal any of the jokes. I decided to keep them on a vaudeville stage but to change the scenery to something completely unrelated or random for each joke. Like a Butcher Shop. Just so people would say "Why are they in a Butcher Shop?" I don't know. I also was consciously trying to storyboard so that the animation would be relatively simple. I took out any walk ins and had to figure out ways to cut from scene to scene without it being too jumpy or resorting to fade in and fade outs.

I did a rough design of Milton and Dupree and then started drawing a storyboard in Flash to the soundtrack. While I was doing sketches of the bgs I also came up with some new textures with ink and sponges, that I vectorized in Illustrator. I built the Bgs in Flash and started assembling the individual scenes. I also volunteered Pete to help me. He took my crappy rough character designs and really tweaked and redesigned them into great final designs. He did some nice mouth positions too.

I also wanted to do some of the character animation for this piece so Pete and I split up the 8 scenes. I have done lots of animation of doors opening and the curtain open/close for this piece but I hadn't done a lot of character animation before. I learned a lot about animating in flash and lip syncing. Pete gave me good advice on how to smooth stuff out. We finished the shots just before Thanksgiving and our buddy Michael D'Ambrosio edited it together for us.

It was great working with Matt and the Superego crew, they just let us do whatever we wanted and they are very polite, too. I was happy that they didn't mind that I cut bits together from 4 of their sketches.

My favorite part of this whole piece is the laugh that Pete animated in the Mountain scene. It's a real spontaneous laugh and not an "acted" laugh. It's great to work with such fun audio. Even after listening to the audio a few hundred times, this whole piece still cracks me up.

you can see the final piece here or on the superego website, or download it on itunes.

Furry Vengeance

Pete and I designed and animated the title sequence for the recent hugely successful hit movie, "Furry Vengeance". In December 2009 I was called by my friend, Bill Lebeda creative director at The Picture Mill, to work on storyboard shots for a title pitch. I did a bunch of scenes and sent them off, expecting that they wouldn't get the job. In the title design business every title house does a lot of work for a pitch and then the movie people pick one. And I think The Picture Mill did several different storyboards. I was surprised when Bill called me a few weeks later to say that they had the job to do the final titles and that the producers and directors wanted my style.

I quickly roped Pete in to do the final character design and the character animation. I was the in-house guy at the Mill and Pete was working freelance. At the Picture Mill, there was no computer with Flash so I designed the whole piece on my old 12'' PowerPC Mac. I remember one of the regular employees walking in, pointing at my tiny laptop and laughing.

When I started we first redid the storyboard, and then I started designing the type elements. Originally, we were going to have all the action take place on a black color card, but the producers thought that was a little dark for a family movie. The art director, Grant Nellesen and I tried to come up with alternate color cards for a few days until Pete came in and suggested that we do full backgrounds. Duh, why didn't I think of that. So I continued to design the type elements and the BGs and started setting up the shots. Pete did amazing character designs and awesome animation, and the whole thing came together pretty smoothly. This is one of the first projects where I did some animation. I animated the first bit of type in the tree and the logs rolling around and towards the camera. I also did a bit of rope and pulley animation for the end titles, too. Although the movie wasn't that great we are proud of our short title sequence. 4Leagues!