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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