Venture Brothers Season 2, pt. 6

I was fortunate enough to be listed twice in the credits of "Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner", which aired a couple of weeks ago. I worked as a designer on the show, creating new characters and props, which is what I did for the whole season. After I finished up my design position in early January '06, I got a few calls in the months afterwards to pick up some additional freelance work on the show, which was usually design work that had fallen through the cracks. As it turned out, I was also asked to help out on storyboard revisions for a couple of episodes. The following are 'board revisions for "Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner".




Board Revisions are generally what you might guess they are, mainly additional work putting the characters on model (like the above pages that feature Dean Venture), or sometimes completely redrawing scene angles, etc. (examples shown below), based on those little thumbnail, post-it note fixes that I keep mentioning Mr. Publick would constantly churn out (in addition to writing, designing, and voice acting for the show, along with a million other things not mentioned here). All my work that you see here is done in a thick black ink line on top of the work that the board artist did.








I think these next pages of boards were cut out of the final production.

Summer Camp of Death!

OK. So I know this is a little bit of a cheat for a blog devoted to adult swim. I have reasons though. Having worked on adult swim shows for almost 10 years now, I've come up with a few ideas that I've pitched to the guys at Williams Street. Here's a sample of the one I'm pitching to them now, and that I think has the strongest chance of getting picked up. Please check it out, and enjoy!
______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

I've written a pilot and am now onto the second script. I'd love to hear from you to see what you think. If you'd like to see more about this would-be adult swim project, please visit summercampofdeath.com. There you can find more movies, sketchbook drawings, and free stickers! So what do you think? Could you sit through 15 minutes of this?

The Clowning

A little more from this old episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force #38. Here's the original design for the slutty chick that gets with Carl.

Here's another final pencil test:
________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________

For some reason I did have enough time to put in a considerable amount of work on the animation of this three-quarter run cycle scene. I must have felt the sincere need to portray this fifty year old, would-be girlfriend of Carl running in the funniest way possible, as some sort of icing on the cake of any ATHF animation I was doing at the time. This sort of thing was a real rarety on the show. Probably that and also a mixture of not having anything better to do. At this point in the story, she's running away in terror as the first to witness Carl's hideous mutation into a host for a clown-demon from another dimension, I think...

One of my Favorite Scenes

Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode #38, "The Clowing"

Here's one of my favorite scenes that Charles Zoubek, one of Atlanta's talented animators, and yours truly created sometime around the month of September of 2003.

____________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________

This is what I call a final pencil test. This was always the last step in the production to check everything, making sure the layers fit perfectly, the mouths fit perfectly, the color, etc. Then we would ship it over to Cartoon Network to be composited into the finished scene.

Animation Work That Gets Cut

It happens to the best of us. Every animator can relate to this tale, because all of us have spent hours of toil putting our hearts and souls into some beautiful piece of animation, just so it can get edited out of the final picture, never to be seen again.

This is one of mine that has never been seen until now:



This is Amber, from Aqua Teen Hunger Force Episode #55, "Carl". This scene was cropped in the final from about her shoulders on up, and it stays on that frame as she turns and runs away. You don't get to see much of the effort I put into the boob squeeze animation, and you certainly don't get to see the days of effort put into finishing her running off screen. I got paid to animate it, so wouldn't they want to use it? Anyway, it's not the most beautiful thing in the world. They may have paid me but not enough to do any secondary animation on the hair, or the drooping weight of the form. It's a good thing too or else this post might be twice as long!


And, just for fun, here is the original design of Amber. Poor thing! Shake can be so mean!

Space Ghost Interviews Carl (of ATHF)

Sometime in 2004 I drew an illustration for Giant Magazine for a section which had Space Ghost interviewing Carl. I never saw the final product so I don't even know if it actually printed. But that's not important. What is important are the next few sketches.









Here are 2 sketchbook pages that I drew to get the composition and gag and then submitted for approval. I really like each one, and they seem to get better with each one I drew (after all, these are two of my favorite cartoon characters!).








Personally, I like the third one the best, where Carl is farting and Space Ghost is offended. But, alas, the decision makers at [adult swim], (I think it might have been Dave), chose the one that I thought was the most boring, and then added some legitimacy by throwing in something that Carl had done in the show, sloppily eating buffalo wings. Oh well, at least you can see the others now thanks to the world wide web (Al Gore did what...? Nuh-uh..!).

Venture Brothers Season 2, pt. 5

Love Bheits aired last night. Here are some characters and props. Mr. Jackson Publick drew this first henchman, and I based all the others on it.





































As Chris Battle said in his blog recently, "Sometimes it's the simple props that are the most fun."

Venture Brothers Season 2, pt. 4

This is from last week's episode, Victor. Echo. November. A while back, I mentioned that I had lots of trouble getting into the Venture Brothers style when I started as a designer on the show. Here's a great example of the evolution from my style (which as I mentioned before, was pretty much the Aqua Teen Hunger Force style) to the VB show style, as I worked on the character, Jollyrancher82. This first example shown on the right is a decent drawing, and I definitly used some of the stuff going on there in the final design, but as a whole it's way off. In fact, as I look at it today, it's so ATHF. I don't even think I showed this one for approval.

These next two were a lot closer, but still no cigar...


This is pretty much the final design with a few notes from Jackson Publick on the upper left.

And, this became the final design. You can see that I had to thin up the "big hair", so she wouldn't obscure the entire background.

Here's the Ibis Priest. In this case, he was pretty much approved on the first round of approvals.

I attempted this gag throughout a whole round of drawings. I thought it would be pretty retarded (and therefore funny) if these Ibis Henchmen had these ridiculous ibis beaks on their masks. Mr. Publick didn't go for it, but here they are for your enjoyment!




My first design of Caligula when I was really trying to push the design towards Malcolm McDowell, and, more notes from the big guy on the bottom left.

Mr. Publick had to pretty much redraw this to arrive at the mummy that you see in the episode, but I always thought this drawing was cool anyway. Here's to drawing classic monsters!

Squidbillies Pilot Design

Hello [adult swim] fans. I was involved at the very beginning of the Squidbillies pilot production working on the character design. I was given drawings from the writers that they did themselves, and knew that they wanted a very "un-educated" style, meaning the type of art I (and many others) used to draw in high school. In order to get into the mindset, I did my sketches in ball-point pen on notebook paper. I really like some of the designs posted here, and wish that they had gone for something like these. Ultimately, all these designs below were never used. I struggled to draw un-well, but could never reach the level of un-sophistication that they wanted. However, I had a lot of fun working on these, and the show has come a long way since the pilot. I love the colors and the backgrounds done by Ben Prisk at Primal Screen of Atlanta.




Originally, a lot of the humans were going to be a lot more humanoid. I was really stabbing in the dark with some of these very first ever concept sketches. (I think I remember them hating the first one in the middle.)



I LOVE these studies below with the squids chewing dip. I had years of reference in my very own high school in northern Florida.



In one version of the pilot (that was re-written 704 times), they had a fat brother who couldn't leave his room. Is that in the show?



I love this last one. I actually used reference from my 9th grade (1988) yearbook for the hair.


So, that's it. There are a few more that I may post later, but these are my favorite drawings that I've ever seen associated with the show. (And there's a point I'd like to make here, and it's that as a lover of cartoons I have no problem with a show like Squidbillies and have enjoyed many others that are poorly drawn or poorly animated, eg. Dr. Katz. However, as a cartoon designer, it may not be a project that will challenge my skills and keep me entertained. So in this case, I ultimatley felt like I had nothing that I could "bring to the table", and this, in no small way, affected my decision to move to NYC, and to ultimately jump onto the Venture Brothers team.) There may be some more never before seen pilot design sketches out there that I don't know about that are also worth seeing. If so, hopefully this will get the ball rolling. And speaking of Venture Brothers, I'm scanning away right now!