Squirly Town Pencil Test
This past summer I had the pleasure to once again work with my pal Doug TenNapel, this time on one of his latest creations, Squirly Town, an animated short he's producing for Frederator and Nickelodeon's Random Cartoons. I did storyboard supervision and a bunch of preproduction work including model sheets, mouth charts, color models, etc. It won't air until next year sometime, but once it does I'll post some of the artwork I created for the project. In the meantime, check out one of the pencil tests that just came in from overseas:
Labels: Squirly Town
posted by MikeD at 11:40 AM
5 Comments:
Man, Doug is trying to take over tv! Looking forward to seeing some production art.
that last frame is gold! i want to see more of that in cartoons today. i just got a hold of a lot of tex avery stuff and it's got me started on my own screwy project. i wish more stuff was done here, i'd love to work as even an inbetweener under people like you and doug! great stuff mike!
Thanks smo. The sad thing is that I wanted to take on the animation for this short, and Doug and I tried to figure out some way to make it happen, but in the end the amount Nick was willing to pay for the animation was so low there was just no way I could do it without losing money.
Study that Tex Avery and go for it on your project. By the way, here's the secret to what made Avery's work so wonderful, and I'm surprised how few people who claim to be inspired by his work actually get this: His animation is firmly grounded in reality. What I mean is, he establishes the reality of his universe through the believable weight, gravity and mass in the drawings and their timing as created by his crew of classical animators. Once established, it's the contrast to that reality that makes his outlandish takes and wild actions so wonderful.
ugh yeah i definitely hear you on the budgets. right now i'm working on a flash animation called "pale force" for nbc, conan o brien, and jim gaffigan. they were going to outsource to some company who barely knew how to animate, but i'm doing it with a friend for the same price just because i really wanted to work on it. and we only get a week to make each one...it's ridiculous.
right now it's a lofty dream but i'm never going to stop pushing to bring animation back to the states, and to people who love to animate. there's got to be a way!
and yeah, i definitely started noticing that on avery! those backgrounds are gorgeous! and it makes them even sillier when there's an element out of place!
This looks great Mike! Overseas huh? Oh well sorry that didn't work out for you to do the animation. I'm stoked to hear your doing a little film!
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