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Michael Jackson's chimpanzee Bubbles is getting his own stop motion feature.

The post Starburns To Make Stop-Motion Michael Jackson Biopic From Chimp’s Point of View appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

"Anomalisa" is the first feature film from TV animation producer Starburns Industries.

Press rooms at Comic Con are both great fun and sometimes a bit of a tease in that you get face time with some of your favorite television creators, but it’s in such a short burst, you have to really make the most of it.

This afternoon, I joined a group of other members of the Press Corps for a set of roundtable interviews with the creators behind the Back to the Future/Doctor Who/Twilight Zone parody series Rick & Morty: Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland (who had a drink in hand that I was hoping was scotch, but was instead apple juice, I learned), and Ryan Ridley.

Harmon, who developed the show with Roiland, first addressed a question regarding the fact that the first two episodes of the new season, the first of which is set to debut on July 26th, had leaked out onto torrent sites a month early:

It was a mixed blessing, Justin and I were worried about the first episode frankly, because it was very complicated. So the silver lining of the leak…is that it was sort of like a soft roll-out. And the other part of the mixed blessing is that people would want your show that bad, that your trucks are being hijacked on their way to the city. It’s good marketing, I guess.

Though Roiland was quick to point out that the episode was also still unfinished.

Roiland: There’s still little animation mistakes and things I’m fixing.

Harmon: We have to add all the d*cks.

Roiland: Right, and the version that leaked had no d*cks, and the final version is supposed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty d*cks. *laughter* But I was shocked by how many people loved that episode.

Given some the content that makes it onto the screen from the series, and there’s quite a few examples that I’m blushing to even describe, I was curious about what sort of network restrictions they might face and if there was anything that was just too raunchy to make it on the air.

Roiland: Very little (motioning to Harmon), didn’t you post to Instagram some of the edits they asked for?

Harmon: Yeah, I always think S&P memos are hilarious.

Roiland: “Remove Worm Jerry’s butthole”

Me: “Anus”

Harmon: Right! It’s just so funny to see a list and go…”Jesus Christ!” (laughter)

Roiland: But usually we get to do what we want, aside from notes that go “censor the use of f*ck here”, it’s all the ones where we go: “yeah, we knew that”.

After a discussion of events that occur in the leaked episode (that frankly, didn’t make much sense out of context to me, but good job to my fellow journos who admitted they watched a torrented episode to the creators), Roiland teased one tid-bit that there’s a really great moment coming where we meet an alternate reality step-dad for Morty named Paul Fleischmann, a character who Ridley (who is Jewish) described as a “highly anti-semitic selling out of my people”.

Before time ran out, the team addressed how the popularity of the show affected the development of the second season:

Roiland: Going into season two, we realized the stakes were raised and were blown away by how well received season one was. We wanted to keep the bar high. I think that kind of stuff swimming around in the back of your head can make stuff harder.

Harmon: I think, well-received or not, the part that’s difficult is doing a second season of a show that’s out there. You can’t put a mirror in front of a parakeet without changing the entire environment of the cage.

Roiland: Yeah, there’s also a number of sweater threads and things we purposefully left open…

Ridley: Lots of debates about “should we do more Mr. Meeseeks episodes? Or let’s bring back Evil Mortie!”…

Harmon: You’ll realize that you’ll never regain that initial joy (of the first season).

Additional details we learned are that Mr. Meeseeks (that great blue character that I love doing an impression of) will indeed be making a cameo next season and there will be another television episode in the vein of “Rixty Minutes”, though it will not have quite as clean an “A” and “B” plot as that initial entry. Roiland calls it very “balls to the wall”. The team also revealed that Beth, Morty’s mother, will finally go on an adventure and we’ll also meet one of Rick’s ex-lovers.

During the panel that followed afterward, the same trio mentioned that this upcoming season will also introduce Morty’s Uncle Steve as well as a new creature that resembles a banana wearing a top hat that is referred to as “Mr. Poopy Butthole”.

Rick and Morty, folks! It’s great!

"Don’t spend any money, but be more encouraging of risk," says Adult Swim honcho Mike Lazzo.

The overworked and underpaid artists on Adult Swim’s "Rick and Morty" ratified a new labor agreement last week, and 'Rick and Morty''s co-creator doesn't like how it happened.

As Breaking Bad concluded its epic television run, one fan mapped out the epic TV series as a Dan Harmon story circle.

Community creator Harmon writes using a story circle, making sure that every script meets his eight steps of a satisfying story. As you can see by the chart embedded above (filled with spoilers), Breaking Bad contained all eight elements and can help aspiring storytellers master the elegant structure. Here’s more from Wired about Harmon’s method:

So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps … Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When television creators Dan Harmon (Community) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Moral Orel) — partners in Los Angeles production company Starburns Industries — were thinking of ideas to develop for animation, they remembered a Charlie Kaufman-penned play called Anomalisa that they’d seen staged in Los Angeles in 2005. They envisioned great possibilities for the project, and soon had Kaufman’s blessing to pursue funding to produce an animated film.

The only hitch was that the idea — a 40-minute stop-motion film revolving around a man crippled by the mundanity of his existence — wasn’t an easy sell to either TV networks or film studios who have predefined notions of what animation is. In another country, they might have been funded by a government arts program, but in the United States, Anomalisa was destined to languish as an idea.

Enter crowd-funding.

Harmon and Stamatopoulos launched a campaign in early July using the online fundraising website Kickstarter. Their campaign, which ended yesterday afternoon, set a new record for an animation project on the crowd-funding platform, raising over $406,000, more than double its goal. More impressively, it is at least the 5th animated project that has raised over $100,000 this past summer on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter says that films have been the second-most funded category on their site this year with over $42 million pledged through August 31. They haven’t provided a breakout for what percentage of that amount has gone toward animation projects, but it is in the millions of dollars.

The director of the forthcoming Anomalisa is Duke Johnson, a veteran of Starburns projects including Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole. Johnson explains to Cartoon Brew how the crowd-funding route can be a boon to both the filmmakers and the audience:

“For this particular project, we are inspired by the idea of a pure artistic vision from script to screen.  Meaning that all creative and even technical decisions, like distribution, are made by a core creative team with no incentive beyond making the best possible film out of a script they believe in.  Which we believe will ultimately give people something they really want and can’t otherwise have.”

Visual effects veteran Phil Tippett, who owns the esteemed Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, recently restarted production on a twenty-year-old personal film project called Mad God, which he calls an “anti-studio, anti-corporate, anti-commercial statement.” He got back into it at the urging of younger employees working at his studio who wanted to step away from their computers and learn the craft of stop motion animation. To fund the project, Tippett initially auctioned props from his long career in visual effects, including an AT-AT Imperial Walker from The Empire Strikes Back and a RoboCop puppet from RoboCop 2.

When the funds from those auctions began to dwindle, Tippet turned to Kickstarter. He sought to raise a conservative $40,000 to cover the costs of studio space, crew lunches, hard drive storage, lab services and other bare essentials. He admits the costs would be much higher if not for the all-volunteer crew and the fact that he owns a lot of film equipment after decades of running his own studio.

Tippett raised more than three times his goal—$124,156—enough to comfortably complete the first chapter of Mad God. He says that the free-from nature of the film, which he likens to painting or sculpture more than filmmaking, leaves it open to an indefinite number of episodes. “The narrative allows me to go back in and open it up,” he told me. “It’s not stuck to a logical timeline. The chapters will continue to get revised over the years.”

Just to be safe, Tippett has already shot an end title for Mad God — “If I die, that’s the end,” — though intriguingly, he also suggests that other artists “after me or alongside me” could take aspects of Mad God and expand upon the concept in different directions.

Another animation veteran who has embraced Kickstarter is Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi. His run-ins with network executives have been well documented throughout the years so when he wanted to resurrect a short film idea based on his character George Liquor, he reached out directly to his fans.

During his fundraising campaign, he told potential supporters on his Kickstarter page, “This is the absolute best way for me to make cartoons for you without pesky executives and middlemen second guessing every gag and drawing I do!” Feeding into the anti-corporate sentiment, one of the rewards he offered was a producer’s shirt that reads, “I Made It Happen! The Body In This Shirt Is The Official Producer of John K’s Can Without Labels.”

Kricfalusi easily exceeded the $110,000 goal needed to produced an 8-to-10 minute short. He wrote that the budget was only half of what it would have cost to produce a Ren and Stimpy short at his former studio Spümcø. The lessened cost is due in large part to the way that Kricfalusi has revamped his production pipeline. He no longer ships animation overseas, instead producing the animation from a home studio equipped with Toon Boom software and a small crew of artists.

The projects by Starburns, Tippett and Kricfalusi aren’t based on series currently in production, and they were able to achieve their financial goals largely on the reputations of their creators. However, two other animation Kickstarter campaigns that have recently achieved six-figure pledge amounts are based on series currently in production. The creators of the Animusic dvd series raised $223,137 to produce a third installment in their series that combines computer animation and electronic music. Meanwhile, the popular Flash-animated series Dick Figures, produced by Six Point Harness and distributed online by Mondo Media, blasted past its $250,000 goal to reach $313,412.

Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, the creators of Dick Figures, encouraged fans to donate so that they could produce a movie-length version of their cartoon. Their financing campaign benefitted from Mondo Media’s 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, says Aaron Simpson, vp of animation and business development at Mondo Media. The company embedded ads for the Kickstarter campaign throughout their YouTube videos, which resulted in approximately half of the Kickstarter funding.

Simpson is quick to point out that having a popular online animated series doesn’t guarantee a successful crowd-funding campaign. Last year, Mondo Media conducted a campaign for its well-established Happy Tree Friends, which raised only 10% of its goal. The company learned a lot from that early failure, including the importance of offering rewards revolving around the project itself (HD film downloads, film soundtracks, behind-the-scenes making-ofs). Ancillary rewards (T-shirts, posters) are fine too, but Simpson says that many supporters are more interested in items directly related to the project itself.

Simpson points out the importance of “creating something really, really special” in relation to the existing product. The creators of Dick Figures didn’t simply ask audiences to fund the production of additional shorts of the same length, but to help create a movie. And successfully reaching a goal is not the end of the line: another important part of their strategy was to create an online space where fans could continue to support the project financially even after the initial Kickstarter campaign was completed.

The Kickstarter projects discussed within all benefitted from being connected to well known creators or established animation properties. It would be unreasonable to expect that an independent or moderately successful filmmaker could raise a similar six-figure amount. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of these campaigns, however. Even known filmmakers such as those in this article would have struggled to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from their fans just a few years ago.

Over the summer, crowd-funding finally emerged as a viable alternative to traditional film production models. There are enough people who are now using platforms like Kickstarter to support the production of professional-quality animated films by name filmmakers. The possibilities are, indeed, limitless now that filmmakers and fans can connect directly with one another instead of relying on a third-party. For animation, it may herald a new era of more innovative and unique projects.

Continue reading for stats about the projects discussed in this article.

Anomalisa by Starburns Industries
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $406,237
Backers: 5,770
Average Pledge: $70.41

Mad God by Phil Tippett
Goal: $40,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 12 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $3,333
Raised: $124,156
Backers: 2,523
Average Pledge: $49.21

Cans Without Labels by John Kricfalusi
Goal: $110,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 8-10 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $11,000-13,750
Raised: $136,724
Backers: 3,562
Average Pledge: $38.38

Dick Figures: The Movie by Six Point Harness
Goal: $250,000
Length of Film Project: 30 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $8,333
Raised: $313,412
Backers: 5,616
Average Pledge: $55.81

Animusic 3 by Animusic
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes (based on previous Animusic release)
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $223,137
Backers: 3,284
Average Pledge: $67.95

When television creators Dan Harmon (Community) and Dino Stamatopoulos (Moral Orel) — partners in Los Angeles production company Starburns Industries — were thinking of ideas to develop for animation, they remembered a Charlie Kaufman-penned play called Anomalisa that they’d seen staged in Los Angeles in 2005. They envisioned great possibilities for the project, and soon had Kaufman’s blessing to pursue funding to produce an animated film.

The only hitch was that the idea — a 40-minute stop-motion film revolving around a man crippled by the mundanity of his existence — wasn’t an easy sell to either TV networks or film studios who have predefined notions of what animation is. In another country, they might have been funded by a government arts program, but in the United States, Anomalisa was destined to languish as an idea.

Enter crowd-funding.

Harmon and Stamatopoulos launched a campaign in early July using the online fundraising website Kickstarter. Their campaign, which ended yesterday afternoon, set a new record for an animation project on the crowd-funding platform, raising over $406,000, more than double its goal. More impressively, it is at least the 5th animated project that has raised over $100,000 this past summer on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter says that films have been the second-most funded category on their site this year with over $42 million pledged through August 31. They haven’t provided a breakout for what percentage of that amount has gone toward animation projects, but it is in the millions of dollars.

The director of the forthcoming Anomalisa is Duke Johnson, a veteran of Starburns projects including Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole. Johnson explains to Cartoon Brew how the crowd-funding route can be a boon to both the filmmakers and the audience:

“For this particular project, we are inspired by the idea of a pure artistic vision from script to screen.  Meaning that all creative and even technical decisions, like distribution, are made by a core creative team with no incentive beyond making the best possible film out of a script they believe in.  Which we believe will ultimately give people something they really want and can’t otherwise have.”

Visual effects veteran Phil Tippett, who owns the esteemed Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, recently restarted production on a twenty-year-old personal film project called Mad God, which he calls an “anti-studio, anti-corporate, anti-commercial statement.” He got back into it at the urging of younger employees working at his studio who wanted to step away from their computers and learn the craft of stop motion animation. To fund the project, Tippett initially auctioned props from his long career in visual effects, including an AT-AT Imperial Walker from The Empire Strikes Back and a RoboCop puppet from RoboCop 2.

When the funds from those auctions began to dwindle, Tippet turned to Kickstarter. He sought to raise a conservative $40,000 to cover the costs of studio space, crew lunches, hard drive storage, lab services and other bare essentials. He admits the costs would be much higher if not for the all-volunteer crew and the fact that he owns a lot of film equipment after decades of running his own studio.

Tippett raised more than three times his goal—$124,156—enough to comfortably complete the first chapter of Mad God. He says that the free-from nature of the film, which he likens to painting or sculpture more than filmmaking, leaves it open to an indefinite number of episodes. “The narrative allows me to go back in and open it up,” he told me. “It’s not stuck to a logical timeline. The chapters will continue to get revised over the years.”

Just to be safe, Tippett has already shot an end title for Mad God — “If I die, that’s the end,” — though intriguingly, he also suggests that other artists “after me or alongside me” could take aspects of Mad God and expand upon the concept in different directions.

Another animation veteran who has embraced Kickstarter is Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi. His run-ins with network executives have been well documented throughout the years so when he wanted to resurrect a short film idea based on his character George Liquor, he reached out directly to his fans.

During his fundraising campaign, he told potential supporters on his Kickstarter page, “This is the absolute best way for me to make cartoons for you without pesky executives and middlemen second guessing every gag and drawing I do!” Feeding into the anti-corporate sentiment, one of the rewards he offered was a producer’s shirt that reads, “I Made It Happen! The Body In This Shirt Is The Official Producer of John K’s Can Without Labels.”

Kricfalusi easily exceeded the $110,000 goal needed to produced an 8-to-10 minute short. He wrote that the budget was only half of what it would have cost to produce a Ren and Stimpy short at his former studio Spümcø. The lessened cost is due in large part to the way that Kricfalusi has revamped his production pipeline. He no longer ships animation overseas, instead producing the animation from a home studio equipped with Toon Boom software and a small crew of artists.

The projects by Starburns, Tippett and Kricfalusi aren’t based on series currently in production, and they were able to achieve their financial goals largely on the reputations of their creators. However, two other Kickstarter animation campaigns that have recently concluded with six-figure pledge totals are based on series currently in production. The creators of the Animusic dvd series raised $223,137 to produce a third installment in their series that combines computer animation and electronic music. Meanwhile, the popular Flash-animated series Dick Figures, produced by Six Point Harness and distributed online by Mondo Media, blasted past its $250,000 goal to reach $313,412.

Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, the creators of Dick Figures, encouraged fans to donate so that they could produce a movie-length version of their cartoon. Their financing campaign benefitted from Mondo Media’s 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, says Aaron Simpson, vp of animation and business development at Mondo Media. The company embedded ads for the Kickstarter campaign throughout their YouTube videos, which resulted in approximately half of the Kickstarter funding.

Simpson is quick to point out that having a popular online animated series doesn’t guarantee a successful crowd-funding campaign. Last year, Mondo Media conducted a campaign for its well-established Happy Tree Friends, which raised only 10% of its goal. The company learned a lot from that early failure, including the importance of offering rewards revolving around the project itself (HD film downloads, film soundtracks, behind-the-scenes making-ofs). Ancillary rewards (T-shirts, posters) are fine too, but Simpson says that many supporters are more interested in items directly related to the project itself.

Simpson points out the importance of “creating something really, really special” in relation to the existing product. The creators of Dick Figures didn’t simply ask audiences to fund the production of additional shorts of the same length, but to help create a movie. And successfully reaching a goal is not the end of the line: another important part of their strategy was to create an online space where fans could continue to support the project financially even after the initial Kickstarter campaign was completed.

The Kickstarter projects discussed here all benefitted from being attached to well known creators or established animation properties. It would be unreasonable to expect that an independent or moderately successful filmmaker could raise a similar six-figure amount. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of these campaigns, however. Even known filmmakers such as those in this article would have struggled to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from their fans just a few years ago.

Over the summer, crowd-funding finally emerged as a viable alternative to traditional animation financing models. There are enough people who are using platforms like Kickstarter to support the production of professional-quality animated films by name filmmakers. The possibilities are, indeed, limitless now that filmmakers and fans can connect directly with one another instead of relying on third parties. For animation, it may herald a new era of more innovative and unique projects.

Continue reading for stats about the projects discussed in this article.

Anomalisa by Starburns Industries
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $406,237
Backers: 5,770
Average Pledge: $70.41

Mad God by Phil Tippett
Goal: $40,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 12 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $3,333
Raised: $124,156
Backers: 2,523
Average Pledge: $49.21

Cans Without Labels by John Kricfalusi
Goal: $110,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 8-10 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $11,000-13,750
Raised: $136,724
Backers: 3,562
Average Pledge: $38.38

Dick Figures: The Movie by Six Point Harness
Goal: $250,000
Length of Film Project: 30 minutes
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $8,333
Raised: $313,412
Backers: 5,616
Average Pledge: $55.81

Animusic 3 by Animusic
Goal: $200,000
Length of Film Project: Approx. 40 minutes (based on previous Animusic release)
Projected per Minute Cost of Animation: $5,000
Raised: $223,137
Backers: 3,284
Average Pledge: $67.95