Frederator

I recently found that this blog has been linked as a “Site of Interest” on the Frederator Cartoon Blog. Welcome to anyone visiting from there. Some of the best projects that I worked on with my previous employer were contracts from Frederator, and since one of the purposes of this blog is shameless self promotion I’ll take you on an illustrated tour of the some work I have done for them.

Random Cartoons Opening.

We were presented with the logo for this series which will be a collection of various animated shorts which will show on Nickelodeon some time in 2007. The Frederator Cartoon Blog is a collection of production blogs for creators of the shorts that will appear on this program. You can see the animation for this sequence on its production blog. With this project I conceived and storyboarded the opening based on the given logo.I designed a bunch of contraptions for them to choose from. The designs were greatly inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Andrew SmithThese are the drawings for the final contraption with some of the reference pasted in.I personally prefer the original color scheme before it was made more “bright and playfull.”

FredEx-FartRobot

I talked about this before. You may have seen when we were front paged on CG Talk. This was a 10 second animation for part of a compilation film celebrating the anniversary of Channel Frederator. Different animators were asked to conceive how a robot would do a particular thing. Our topic was a fart. For those that choose to view it I'll give you a warning that some of the topics given to varying animators took on a very ADULT tone. For this project I conceived the idea of old pot bellied stove robot, and did the design. I also did the final audio and helped with the final composite.Six Monsters

This one is currently in production. You can see its current status at its production blog. We were given 1 minute of the 7 minute short which will play like a Variety/Sketch Comedy Show. I wrote the story for our minute with input from the rest of studio, and rewrites by Fred Seibert & Alan Goodman, I then storyboarded our segment.The original character designs were by Alex Kirwan, and each of the segments will have the style of the animator doing that 1 minute gag. I wasn’t given a lot of leeway in my direction to change the designs around; my instructions were to just make Alex’s drawings translate to 3D.I designed the set with old sketch comedies in mind. I looked at Hee Haw, and SNL, and Sonny and Cher, and tried to keep simplicity in the set, but make it complex enough to go with the detail of rendered fur on the main character. The sets of the film Pleasantville seemed to meet those requirements, being based on old TV sets themselves. They were big influences. I tried to make areas in the set to stage the characters so hopefully, in the final, the light character will be against dark and the dark character against light. I was able to set all the models up in the set with cameras before I left, so it appears to be working. Sadly I didn't get to animate my shots. As the production goes forward without me I hope it will come close to what I’ve imagined in my mind for the last few months while creating it