Underwater Schoolbus

Project Title: Adult Swim Bump
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Note: There’s a bit of lost quality in the Flash format, because of frame issues.
This bump animation for Adult Swim was so fun to make. They had all these plastic owls lying around the office there, the kind you would buy at an outdoors store to scare away pigeons or whatever. The owls must’ve been part of some Adult Swim Comicon booth originally, but by the time I arrived, they were just lying around, up for grabs.

On a side note, the decor at Adult Swim is somewhere between slovenly and innovative. It looks like creative persons there will occasionally get a burst of inspiration for decorating the place, stapling fake turf to the walls for example, take a few days to enact it, then lose enthusiasm and leave the project unfinished. As a result, the inside of Adult Swim is a patchwork of mismatched, half-finished interior design ideas. It’s kind of charming, actually. Maybe that’s intentional. Anyway,

Back to this animation. Adult Swim is located in Midtown, which is a very visually interesting part of Atlanta. Likewise, the inside of the building has lots of cool stuff to look at. I thought it would be neat to incorporate photos of the neighborhood and the office into a stop-motion style animation (though “stop-motion” exactly right). So I took one of the owls, and improvised a boom arm which I attached to a digital camera. What I had was a camera with an owl always in the same spot in the frame; I could take any picture I wanted and the owl wouldn’t move (much). Then when I played them all back to back, I got this neat effect of the owl seeming to fly all around. After the photos were done, I decided to do a rotoscoping effect. So I sketched on top of each photo I had taken, doubling the number of images I had.

Like I said, this bump was lots of fun to create. I got to walk around and snap photos while people in the office and outside wondered what the hell was up with the guy with owl camera. Executive Producer Mike Lazzo called this bump beautiful, which was nice. Also, if you look closely, you can catch the Adult Swim interns!

RATE THIS: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Project Title: Adult Swim Bump
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
(1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
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I’m giving this Bump just 2 stars. I had big plans for these giant monsters, but I got caught up in After Effects, playing with Null Layers, Cameras, and Z-position. I guess it was a good learning experience, but I can’t help feeling regret when I look at this animation. It’s boring. If I had it to do over, I would drop in a flying saucer, which would fry the skin off the giant lizard, then would both monsters would pull out giant keytars and jam together. Also, the Ring Girl at the end would trip and fall.
RATE THIS: (1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
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Project Title: Adult Swim Bump
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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I animated Bump in December 06, after being at Adult Swim for 4 months or so. I remember my techniques were still pretty raw, so I know it was one of the earlier bumps. In the original version of this bump, Santa hops on screen, coughs up a kidney and then watches in terror as it is beamed up by an unknown force. I thought that was hilarious, but I was having to explain the joke to everyone else, always a bad sign. The elf getting spit out was my boss’s idea, which I loved and immediately put in the animation.
RATE THIS: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Project Title: Adult Swim Bump
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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This Adult Swim Bump is in my top 5. I think the song is by Grizzly Bear, but don’t quote me. On the left is Karl Marx, father of communism, and on the right is Mao Zedong, leader of the communist revolution in China. People often think this animation is saying that Marx’s ideas are fertile ground and that’s an understandable interpretation. However, I don’t really believe that at all. The truth is, my bosses at Adult Swim were on my case to make an animation that “means something”. I usually prefer to leave the meaning up the viewer, so I just threw in a lot of symbolism to appease them and thus it doesn’t have a real message. Maybe I subconsciously intended to say that Karl Marx was full-of-shit, or even that the animation is, since it was faking a deep political statement.
Here’s a doodle I made while working on this:

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Project Title: Bump Animation
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
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Yet again, the version that I have here is slightly different from what you see on TV. The reason has to do with After Effects Plugin licenses. You can purchase something for Adobe After Effects called a plugin. What a plugin does is provide a pre-built, easy-to-use way to create a given effect. For instance, there’s lots of “Film Effect” plugins that will make a digital camera clip look like it was shot on 9mm, complete with grain and scratches. Plugins (the good ones) are expensive – $1500 per license sometimes. And a license will usually only work for one computer. At Adult Swim, access to the fancy plug ins was beyond my pay grade. My boss, Michael, would sometimes take my bumps and tweak them in AE and that was the case with this animation. He added a Film Effect to the painting, so it looked like a really old camera was used. In this case, I didn’t think it added a whole lot. However, this animation, was vastly improved using the same effect.

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Project Title: Bump Animation
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2007
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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This animation came toward the end of the series. Up to this point, I had animated almost everything in Photoshop, which gave a lot of control but was time consuming. For this bump, I animated the elements separately, imported them into After Effects, and used position keyframes to move things around. That approach saves time, but can make things look a little too smooth and computerized. Since then, I’ve picked up some tricks to better integrate hand-drawn animation with After Effects, like reducing the FPS or toggling hold keyframes.

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Project Title: Bump Animation
Client: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network
Date created: 2006
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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I created this animation right around New Year’s 2007. The original version actually said Happy New Year, as opposed to [adult swim]. I’m not even sure if this one ever aired, because I was in Hawaii for my sister’s wedding on New Year’s. In case you’re wondering, yes that is Bambi.

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