The Woodlands “Seasons,“ “SURPRISE,“ & Mr. Pine’s Lovely Afternoon - bumperS for Bento Box Entertainment (the folks who make Bob’s Burgers)
In the early 2000’s I had a comic strip called The Woodlands that ran in several issues of Nickelodeon Magazine.
Years later I was approached by Bento Box Entertainment to come up with some short animated bumpers for their company.
I had just published a book version of The Woodlands comics at the time and was having fun drawing goofy talking trees.
The shorts were to be about 15 seconds long, and I thought that The Woodlands would be easy to adapt - each strip could work as a short animation.
Rather than just pitch the idea with the comic strips I thought I’d make a sort of low tech animatic, with scanned drawings “animated“ using Windows Movie Maker (the only video editor I had on hand, and the WORST thing to animate with) - I used the voice memo recorder on my phone to record the voices and threw together some bloopy music (also recorded via voice memo) and stiched it all together with the primitive movie editing software.
I thought they timed out nicely and got the idea across better than a comic strip would have.
The idea was that if they liked the pitch then the professionals at Bento Box would animate them and get real actors to do voices and I could record some actual music to score them.
Much to my surprise, the team at Bento Box REALLY liked my silly no-budget animatics and thought that they might lose some of their inherent charm if they were professionally animated. They wanted to use the shorts “as is“ and asked only that I change the aspect ratio of the videos. So, that’s what happened.
I made three very badly animated, very poorly voiced, and very silly short cartoons of The Woodlands for Bento Box!
“BLACKBERRY PIE“ & “UNDERGROUND“ from the album “JUMP FOR JOY!“ BY CASPAR BABYPANTS
In 2017 I got to talking with Chris Ballew (former frontman of The Presidents of the USA) who was working on a new Caspar Babypants album (Caspar Babypants is his awesome children’s music project).
He’d seen the shorts I did for Bento Box and specifically wanted something with that home-made/punk rock/DIY vibe and so I worked on two music videos for him that summer - “Underground” even features some of my Woodlands characters.
This one, “Blackberry Pie”, is my personal favorite of the two. This “ooh-whee“ chorus gets stuck in my head to this day.
I loved the Presidents when I was in high school, and never imagined that I’d get to collaborate on art with Chris one day.
ROBBERT BOBBERT & THE BUBBLE MACHINE - “WE R SUPER HEROES“
Way back in 2008 I started working with Robert Schneider, one of my all-time favorite songwriters (from The Apples in Stereo!) on creating Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine - his new music project aimed at kids.
It was a very personal project for Robert and I was super excited that he trusted me to develop it with him.
I designed a cartoon version of the character of Robert as Robbert Bobbert, wearing goggles and a lab coat, and wrote a comic book based around the songs on the album. The full CD package was designed by me and came with the full color comic book, a coloring book with song lyrics, and very fancy packaging - it’s one of my favorite projects I’ve had the privilege to work on!
After the album came out, we were approached by the popular kids show Yo Gabba Gabba! about having a Robbert Bobbert music video featured on the show.
Nickelodeon’s seasoned animators took over that video ultimately, but they did stick closely to my design for Robbert Bobbert and my hand-lettering for the title at the start of the video. They also reached out to a bunch of cartoonists (some of whom I’m friends with, which made it cooler!) and asked them to contribute drawings of their own weird superheroes, which were then animated into the video.
My own contribution to the super-hero portion was a character I called “The Secret Admirer” - if you look closely you’ll see him (a caped crusader in shades of red) tossing a rose at the 1:48 mark.
The Poet “Silence Has A Lot To Say“
Some of my friends made a sketch show called “Dadurday Night Live” during the pandemic and asked me to contribute some kind of film. I’d been messing around with animation on my iPad and made this short adaptation of one of The Poet comic strips.
I thought it would be funny if it was like a weird foreign film with subtitles and indecipherable language sort of like the characters in the video game “Animal Crossing.” Anyway, I’ve been thinking about making a longer animated version of The Poet in the future sometime, so who knows? This was like a test.