Good News and Great Plug

I'm entering my last week in Malaysia! After a bit of time in Europe, I'll be back in NYC August 13th. So soon there'll (maybe) be more stuff here, and certainly less on my Malaysian blog, which you should totally check out if you haven't already.

The good news.

My TMBG video "I Can Add" (aka only thing this blog has covered in months) got into the Ottawa Animation Festival, which (FYI Mom and Dad) is the biggest (and I think only) international animation festival in North America.

To me, the cool thing about this is that Ottawa is now the second convention/festival that I went to and then decided I'd like to get something in it, and actually succeeded. Before my senior year at RISD, I went to the Small Press Expo (an indy comic convention), and afterwards figured I should make a graphic novel and try to get it published, which I did with Salmon Doubts (a book so successful that it's ranked 1.3 millionth in sales and was so hard to keep in stock that Amazon quit trying). Two years ago I went to Ottawa, and now I've got an animation in it, so I can only assume I Can Add will reach Salmon Doubts levels of popularity. The crushing details of reality aside, I am still batting a thousand, so if anyone has tickets to the Academy Awards let me know.

The great plug.

My friends Max and Ru also did a music video for TMBG with David Cowles. It is absolutely outstanding, and you have to watch it right now.



Did you watch it yet? I'll wait.

Okay, so at some point during the video you probably said to yourself, "I wonder how they did that." Well wonder no longer, Max and Ru put together a "Making Of" blog post. Check it out.

H2 - The Winter Killer

In 2007, I was briefly hired by the New York based ad agency Endoplasmic Reticulum. This was a quick "proof of concept" I put together for their pitch to GM.

I was let go a week later.*



*None of this is true.

New Video: Dawerism

I made a new video. It's a parody of those Dewar's commercials.



And I even went to the effort of registering Dawerism.com
You can see a higher quality quicktime of the video there.

I am a winner!

This past Sunday, ASIFA East had it's 39th annual Animation Festival. I couldn't make it because I was on the other side of the planet, but the TMBG music video "I Can Add" I directed with David Cowles won an award, which I'm pretty sure means I won an award, which means I probably missed my chance to make an acceptance speech, which when you think about it, is everyone's loss (but mostly mine).

According to man-about-town Sean McBride the award was for "Excellence in Education," which is only fitting because I teach good.

And, lest I forget, let me once more promise a beer to everyone who helped out with the animation.

Joe Apel
Pedro Delgado
Nelson Diaz
Jeff Fletcher
Aya Fukuda
Casey Leonard
Jonathan Renoni
Thomas Sebasian Smolenski
Joe Stucky
Joe Quinones

And if you still haven't seen the music video, what are you waiting for? Check it.

They Might Be Giants

Last year I was lucky enough to work with illustrator David Cowles on a They Might Be Giants music video for a TMBG children's CD/DVD called Here Come The 123s. We worked out the concepts and storyboards together, David designed the characters, and I was lead animator.

Each week on their video podcast, TMBG releases a new music video from the album, and last Friday my video was up.

The song is called, I Can Add, and someone was nice enough to post the video podcast on YouTube. Check it out. And stay tuned for the second music video, Seven Days of the Week, which my friend Sean McBride did with David Cowles.



I did the video entirely in Flash, and I'm proud of how it came out, and how little it looks like standard Flash animation.

Click here to see a high quality quicktime of the video.

And as a special bonus, here is the storyboard/animatic for the video. Because I was going to need some help getting all the animation done in time, I tried to do a decent amount of the rough animation in the boards so that anyone I could trick into helping me would know what I was going for.



And finally, here's the list of everyone who was nice enough to help me out with the animation. I still owe them big time.

Joe Apel
Pedro Delgado
Nelson Diaz
Jeff Fletcher
Aya Fukuda
Casey Leonard
Jonathan Renoni
Thomas Sebasian Smolenski
Joe Stucky
Joe Quinones