W/M turns the Gay Duo LIVE on Saturday Night

It was quite a surprise as the long dormant TV FUNHOUSE segment on Saturday Night Live returned with a special cartoon produced by W/M Animation on last Saturday Night's episode hosted by Ed Helms. The seeds of the cartoon began with an Ambiguously Gay Duo feature film script that creator Robert Smigel wrote five years ago with Stephen Colbert. Recently it was suggested by comedy director Jason Woliner that it might be interesting to do the Gay Duo as a live action short for SNL. Smigel liked the idea, Woliner was tapped to direct the live action and long time collaborators David Wachtenheim and Robert Marianetti of W/M were asked to handle the animation.

Utilizing all the old cartoons, W/M produced a storyboard incorporating as much reuse of standard shots from the original cartoons that they could but the whole thing had to be reanimated for a 16:9 wide screen format instead of the original 4:3 anyway. Unlike all the previous shorts, this one was going to be produced in Flash instead of traditional paper and pencil but in the way W/M has been using Flash. "We animate in Flash like it's on paper. We don't use tweening or squashing and stretching elements which is what gives flash a digital look. We just substitute a tablet for paper." explains Wachtenheim. The stellar animation crew, comprised of Dan Madia, Stephen Jackett, Don McGrath and Tom Witte blazed through the animation in six days and After Effects artist Dale Clowdis burned the midnight oil to composite the cartoon. Original Gay Duo production company JJ Sedelmaier Productions graciously provided the original BGs for W/Ms use which, ironically, were originally painted by Wachtenheim when he was employed there, and Kevin Lacroix provided additional BG painting. W/M also contributed to the writing, consulted on the costumes and worked back and forth with the live action director and the editors to make sure the transitions from animation to live action worked.
Could this mean more cartoons for SNL and a return of TV Funhouse? "It would be nice but I kind of doubt it," adds Marianetti, "It was great for us to revisit SNL after the show stopped producing the cartoons three years ago. We've done more cartoons for them than any other studio. This one being exactly number 50 produced by our studio W/M Animation. I'm not sure why, maybe because The Ambiguously Gay Duo was the very first cartoon on TV Funhouse, but it feels like we've come full circle with this one. Plus, even if we never do another cartoon for SNL, at least we went out with a bang."

All in all, it was a huge surprise for the audience to see Jon Ham and Jimmy Fallon in the starring roles with Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, long time voices of Ace and Gary as the live action villains. SNL host Ed Helms and cast member Fred Armisen rounded out the villainous crew. As soon as the cartoon aired, the internet has been all abuzz regarding the return of TV Funhouse and the ever popular Ambiguously Gay Duo.



Written By:
Robert Smigel, Stephen Colbert, Akiva Schaffer, Jason Woliner, David Wachtenheim, Brian Reich

ANIMATION CREDITS

Directed by
David Wachtenheim

Produced by
Robert Marianetti

Voices
Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Bill Chott, Robert Smigel

Animation
Dan Madia, Steve Jackett, Tom Witte, Don McGrath, David Wachtenheim

Compositor
Dale Clowdis

Backgrounds
Kevin Lacroix, Robert Marianetti

Original Backgrounds, Animation and Design
J.J. Sedelmaier Productions

Background Art Assistants for JJSP
Corrie Lebens, Zero Lastimosa

Producer Emeritus
Samantha Scharff

Audio Post
Mike Fisher

Music
Steven M. Gold

LIVE ACTION CREDITS

Director
Jason Woliner

Producer
Dina Moles

Cast
Jon Hamm, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Ed Helms, Fred Armisen

Assistant Director
Neil Daly

Director of Photography
Aaron Phillips

Production Manager
Justus Mclarty

CGI
Graham Holly

Special Effects Makeup
Louie Zarkarian

Costume Designer
Brian Hemesath

Set Decorator
Teri Bella

Post Production Producer
Rhys Thomas

Editor
Adam Epstein

Stunt Coordinator
Brian Smyi
Alex Daniels

Plugging Directing Animation

It's PLUG TIIIMMMMEEEE!!!!
Yes, it's that portion of the show when we plug the latest hot ticket item to buy for the holidays. Today, we are happy to recommend our friend Dave Levy's latest book entitled "Directing Animation". Very appropriately titled because it is about directing animation. What's that you say? What's to direct? There are no actors in animation. Au contraire mon frere! An animator is an actor with a pencil (or Wacom stylus) and there is a team of designers and artists who need a leader with the artistic vision to head up the production.
The book is CHOCK FULL of insight and information from a wide range of directors of commercials, web, TV and film that shed light and offer advice on what it takes to direct in animation.
Dave's style of writing is informative and witty and will have you laughing while hearing great anecdotes about production woes and triumphs. You can't get this information anywhere else. Learn directly from real life situations from some of the top directors in the industry today. What's really great is that Dave Levy is a director himself so not only does he offer his own animation war stories but you get the real meat of information because he knows what he is talking about and knows what to ask of his interviewees. Learn from their mistakes and their revelations of secrets behind the drawing table. You can't learn this in in a classroom kids!
It's a great book for anyone interested in the process of animation or if you know someone in animation and just want to learn a little bit more of what they do.
Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it includes some awesome insights from David Wachtenheim and Robert Marianetti. Yes, we are in the book. Ok, there I said it. I'm biased. But it really is a great read.

More Big Baby

We recently wrapped animating five more episodes of the popular Big Baby series of shorts for Cartoon Network. Don't know when or where they will be airing but this time and don't know how much we can say about it. CN is a little guarded about letting too much information out before its time and of course new Big Baby shorts have been on the forefront of everyone's thoughts for a long time. I can't tell you how many times someone has stopped me on the street saying, "Hey man, when are you doing more Big Babys" or "When are you doing a Big Baby feature, that s#*t is awesome?" or "hey can I have a dollar!" Yes, the streets of New York are brimming with Big Baby fans. And for those of you who think I am talking about the character Big Baby from the last Pixar film Toy Story 3 well, I'm not. Obviously, the folks at Pixar are huge fans of ours and decided to pay tribute to our work. Thank you John Lasseter. We like your work too.

Thanks to all of our crew who worked on the new shorts.
Directors/Writers - David Wachtenheim, Robert Marianetti
Animators - Steve Mead, Mike Wetterhahn, Daniel Bodinof, Jessica Milazzo, David Wachtenheim
Character Designs and Layouts - Sean Latrell
Backgrounds Layouts - Jason Macdonald, Gideon Kendall, Robert Marianetti
Background Painter - Kevin Lacroix
After Effects Artistes - Dale Clowdis, Bryce Jarrett
(apologies if anyone was left out)

Thanks also to the folks at CN:
Creator/ writer - Dave Striepe
Producer - Steve Patrick
Executive Producer - Evan Adler
Sound - Michael Kohler

For those of you who have never seen or heard of Big Baby, here is one of the original seven shorts found on cartoonnetwrok.com
Big Baby: Airplane

Will Elder's Fatty Chicken

Our friend Gary Vandenbergh is creating a documentary on famed MAD magazine artist Will Elder entitled "Chicken Fat" after all the millions of little visual gags Elder would cram into each comic panel. Will was one of the original contributors to MAD magazine and was a huge inspiration and innovator of the magazines outrageous humor. Gary has put together an impressive list of interviews of people who worked with Will or were influenced by him including:
William M. Gaines, Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, Arnold Roth, Drew Friedman, Andy Kindler and many, many more.
Gary was even gracious enough to ask me and Robert to be a part of this wonderful tribute to an amazing artist. Take a look at this promo to see some of the wonderful people paying respects to Will. I don't know how the last guy on the promo got on there but whatever. Sheesh.
Looking forward to the final film Gary.

Here is the full version of the Simon Cowell opening as seen at the beginning of the Rage Against the Machine concert at Finsbury Park.

24 hours to RAGE

The call came on Wednesday afternoon from Gwynn Adik at ACME Filmworks. The band Rage Against the Machine had started an online campaign to garner the #1 single on the charts over the Christmas holiday in the UK. For the past four years, the #1 slot went to the current winner of Simon Cowell's UK show talent show, "X-Factor". With the help of the Facebook page Rage Against X-Factor , the band was successful in knocking off X-Factor winner Joe McElderry's cover of Miley Cyrus' single "The Climb" and gain the number one position much to the dismay of Mr. Cowell.
As thanks to all their fans, RATM was scheduled to play a free victory show at London’s Finsbury Park on June 6th and it was to begin with an animated Simon Cowell introducing the band.

Harvey Lewis of DC3 Global who was producing this segment for RATM was thrilled when he heard we would take the gig and he couldn't have been nicer or more understanding about the constraining schedule. Harvey told us he loved our work on SNL and had the utmost confidence in our abilities. He was sure whatever we gave him would be great and was completely understanding of the limitations. So nice to work with a guy like that.

We would have until Friday to get them the cartoon and if there were any notes, to implement them and upload to London for Saturday morning. Two days? A minute and a half of animation? Inside we were panicking but we said yes, of course. After all, our record to date was a two and a half minute cartoon for SNL in four days (see below for "Are You Hot?" video). One character (Simon Cowell) addressing the audience shouldn't be TOO bad.

The idea for us was to get the look and mannerisms right. If you capture the essence of the character you're halfway there. Luckily (or sadly), I have watched my share of American Idol and was fairly an aficionado of Simon Cowell and his various attitudes. A few well placed key head poses, arm mannerisms, eye rolls and the piece started taking shape but that was only the first 30 seconds. At 5:30 am Friday morning, my strength was waning and I decided it would be best to take a nap and get working later that morning rather than try to work straight through. After a roughly uncomfortable two and a half hour sleep on the couch I restarted at eight am panicked with the dread that I may not get done on time. Somehow, by noon, all the pieces were falling in place, Robert had created a great BG of Simon's "vault" loaded with bags of money and bars of gold.

At 1:30, we sent a test to Harvey who would show it to the band and we had to wait for notes. More panic. It was half done, the end was all rough. There was no lipsync. Would they understand what they were looking at? What if they didn't like it? What if there were tons of notes and corrections? How would we finish on time? Finally, the word came back. NO CORRECTIONS. As a matter of fact the band called it "brilliant" and the guys "totally crushed" on it. (I think that's good!) So off to finish the piece and by 6:00 pm miraculously it was done. Lipsync and all. We had a few glitches with the output to quicktime, but with the aid of editor George Khair, the track was slid and fell perfectly in place and it was uploaded off to London.

Success!



As seen in the YouTube clip above, shot by a fan, the cartoon got a great reaction from the crowd and apparently the band blew the crowd away. Glad we could be a part of it. We will post the original spot another time.

Here's the aforementioned SNL cartoon that held our personal record of four days.

Well trained Dragons

When the first trailer for Dreamworks' latest film "How to Train Your Dragon", hit the screens, I was less than impressed. The dialogue seemed silly, ("thanks for nothing, you useless reptile"), the design of the dragon was less than stellar and seeing Jay Baruchel, the voice of the main character in two other trailers ("She's Out of My League" and "Sorcerer's Apprentice" (G-d help us)) was overkill for me. However, as newer trailers came out with more scenes I started getting more interested and I was looking forward to actually seeing it. Well, yesterday I went to see it with two of my kids and it completely lived up to my expectations and more. I am no movie critic. Just an animator and director with a forum so I will just give my overall impressions without the in-depth film analysis.

Firstly, the character designs were great. I was so happy to see that Dreamworks' strayed from the "realistic" human characters in the Shrek films. The stylized Viking designs, with their massive broad chests and arms, and great big beards were a great departure. And that was just the women (rim shot). The voices were fantastic. It was so nice to hear a Scottish brogue for once in a Dreamworks film that made sense. I never understood why Shrek was from the Highlands but Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson applied their natural brogues to great use in this film. Even the kids voices were stellar, even though the aforementioned Jay Baruchel was aligned with other slightly overexposed young actors, Jonah Hill, Cristopher Mintz-Plasse and Kristen Wiig long with America Ferrara and T.J. Miller. But it didn't matter because the casting was great and enhanced rather than distracted from the characters. I even learned to love the design of toothless, the main dragon character. While he may not look like a conventional dragon as we've all come to think of them, there is reason for that in his character of a mysterious dragon that no one has ever seen before. There are many different species of dragons in this world and they all have there unique looks and fit nicely together in this world.



The acting (yes, I said acting) was great and I don't mean just the voices. The animation of some of the characters was amazing. I can't recall any other animated film I have seen where there were moments that I thought the character of Stoick, the head Viking, was a man in a big Viking costume. Some of the gestures, body language and overall movements and so much life and realism in them it was hard to take your eyes off him every time he was on screen. Truly superb animation. Don't mean to take away from any of the other characters. All were great but Stoick was impressive. I wish I could recall who the animator was.

It even had a good story. Of course, like most "kids" films the plots can be over predictable at times, but this was able to be predictable yet surprising, emotional without being overtly sentimental, and terrific action that made great use of the latest craze of 3D. I have to also give huge kudos to the story team for adding a surprising element in the end (I will not give it away) that other studios may have backed away from and left out but gave the film a real gravitas that you don't see in many "childrens" films. Thank you Dreamworks for being brave. And gratefully, they didn't have to resort to pop culture references for cheap jokes and lame gags.

Lastly, I want to talk briefly about the 3D. What a pain in the ass. I don't know if all the theaters are like this, but the glasses we had were tinted darker on the left eye and they wouldn't fit comfortably on our faces. And while the center of the screen may have been clear, around the edges and peripherally everything was blurry. Man this 3D thing really makes me mad. The whole opening sequence of a dragon attack on the village at night was impossible to see. Having said all that, the production design was beautiful. The rolling green hills, the sprawling sea of viking vessels, were majestic. And the flying sequences really showed off the 3D nicely if you were able to view it.

Overall, I thought it was one of the best if not THE best Dreamworks film to date (although I did like Kung Fu Panda as well) and I hope they continue to take chances and push themselves with every new film that comes out. Next up Shrek Forever After. Well, hopefully after that.