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Rhizome.org published a great interview with David OReilly about his recent Adventure Time episode “A Glitch is a Glitch” and the challenges of making convincing styistic glitch:

“In general, doing stylistic glitch is easy compared to doing good character animation. Mixing the two gets very tricky though. One of the hardest things was corrupting the scene near the end of the entire broadcast so that the earlier clip is superimposed over Finn & Jake to give them an idea (i.e., using glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard that idea, but making it work properly took a lot of grind…It was all generated from ‘real’ glitches—but since everything is run through compositing software and sort of controlled you could also say it was all fake. The glitches needed to begin locally—inside objects—then spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The local stuff was done by generating a ton of sprites that had random pixels move outwardly to create the colorful flourishes we associate with video compression. These had a decent amount of control—a blob of glitchy stuff could move around a scene, for example. Once the scenes were fully animated and rendered the global full-frame glitches were done. There was some jpeg corruption added on top of the battle scene at the end.”

Michael DeForge produces a lot of work. He contributes designs and storyboards to Adventure Time and produces comics and illustrations regularly. His comic Ant Comic is being collected and published by Drawn and Quarterly, and was recently reviewed on The Comics Journal.

Michael is largely a digital artist, drawing from sketch to final stages entirely on the computer. His letter forms and title designs are as unique and varied as the strange characters that inhabit his comics. He has a blog and Tumblr with lots of work to view.

The doors are open and Janet K. Lee is already drawing things! And the first announcement goes to… KaBoom!

And so it turns out that KaBoom Studios, the best comics imprint there is (am I allowed to say that or should I stay impartial?) have announced a new comic called Bravest Warriors. Based on the new Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) TV show of the same name, the series will be written by Joey Comeau and drawn by Mike Holmes. A space adventure following four young “heroes for hire” (sweet christmas!) this is a six-issue miniseries starting in October. Each issue will be 32 pages long, and be priced at $3.99. I cannot confirm at this point that there will be any sweet fist-bumps.

Kid President asks the tough questions that we all want to know.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Adventure Time, Kid President, Pen Ward, Pendleton Ward

The winners of the 2012 Ottawa International Animation Festival were announced earlier tonight at the National Arts Center in Ottawa. The top prize for short film went to Dutch filmmaker Hisko Hulsing for his short Junkyard. The animated feature prize went to the Spanish feature Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras. It’s Such a Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt picked up the audience prize.

I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson picked up two awards, including the grand prize for best student animation. Two films in this year’s Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival were also recognized: Kyle Mowat’s Ballpit won best graduate animation and Noam Sussman’s Gum won the Canadian student animation award.

The complete list of winners is below:

Nelvana GRAND PRIZE for Best Independent Short Animation
Junkyard directed by Hisko Hulsing, Netherlands

GRAND PRIZE for Best Animated Feature
Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras, Spain

Walt Disney GRAND PRIZE for Best Student Animation
I Am Tom Moody directed by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK

GRAND PRIZE for Best Commissioned Animation
Primus “Lee Van Cleef” by Chris Smith, USA

Best Animation School Showreel
Supinfocom (France)

BEST Narrative Short
A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard, STUDIO AKA, USA

BEST Experimental/Abstract Animation
Rivière au Tonnerre directed by Pierre Hébert, Canada

Adobe Prize for BEST High School Animation
The Bean by Hae Jin Jung, Gyeonggi Art High School, South Korea

Honourable Mention:
La Soif Du Monde (Thirsty Frog) by a Collective: 12 Children, Camera-etc, Belgium

BEST Undergraduate Animation
Reizwäsche by Jelena Walf & Viktor Stickel, Germany

BEST Graduate Animation
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada

BEST Promotional Animation
Red Bull ‘Music Academy World Tour’ by Pete Candeland, Passion Pictures, UK

BEST Music Video
The First Time I Ran Away by Joel Trussell, USA

BEST Television Animation for Adults
Portlandia: “Zero Rats” by Rob Shaw, USA

BEST Short Animation Made for Children
Beethoven’s Wig directed by Alex Hawley & Denny Silverthorne, Canada

Honourable Mentions:
Au Coeur de L’Hiver directed by Isabelle Favez, Switzerland
Why do we Put up with Them? directed by David Chai, USA

BEST Television Animation Made for Children
Regular Show: “Eggscellent” by JC Quintel, Cartoon Network

Honourable Mention:
Adventure Time: “Jake vs. Me-Mow” by Pendleton Ward, Cartoon Network, USA

The National Film Board of Canada PUBLIC PRIZE
It’s Such a Beautiful Day directed by Don Hertzfeldt, USA

Canadian Film Institute Award for BEST Canadian Animation
Nightingales in December directed by Theodore Ushev, Canada

Honourable Mentions
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
MacPherson directed by Martine Chartrand, National Film Board of Canada, Canada

BEST Canadian Student Animation Award
Gum by Noam Sussman, Sheridan College, Canadaa

Honourable Mentions
Ballpit by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
Tengri by Alisi Telengut, Concordia University, Canada

The Ottawa Media Jury Award
For the best short competition film, as deemed by the local Ottawa Media, consisting of:

-Peter Simpson (Ottawa Citizen)
-Sandra Abma (CBC)
-Fateema Sayani (Ottawa Magazine)
-Denis Armstrong (Ottawa Sun)

I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK

The Klik! Animation Festival begins tomorrow in Amsterdam and continues through the weekend.

The quirky animation gathering has grown quickly in its first five years of existence. This year’s Klik! includes a full slate of competition screenings, special screenings ranging William Kentridge to Adventure Time, and a focus on the theme of violence in animation. The latter thematic emphasis is particularly intriguing, with programs related to “cartoon violence,” “serious violence,” and “disturbing violence;” screenings of the features The Suicide Shop and Watership Down; and a half-day symposium on violence with a line-up of speakers that include filmmakers, scholars, and psychologists.

And if all that animation isn’t enough, the festival will take place in the impressively futuristic EYE Film Institute, which opened earlier this year. I visited the waterfront Institute last summer, and it’s a perfectly inspiring space to hold an animation festival.

Below is Klik’s 2012 festival leader, directed by Lukas Krepel, Patrick Schoenmaker, and Joost Lieuwma:

Rebecca Sugar writes some of the best songs for Adventure Time, and she also writes some of the best stories for the show. This is an earlier work of hers that demonstrates the further depth of her brilliance.

(via Cartoon Brew TV #21: Singles | Cartoon Brew)

By Shannon O’Leary

Part one of a two part series of email Q&A’s with the indepedent cartoonists working at Cartoon Network. There are so many of them and they were so generous with their time and answers that we had to break their answers up into two posts! These Q&A’s were conducted as research for a Publisher’s Weekly article that spotlights the vast pool of indepent comics talent that’s currently rocking Cartoon Network’s world.

Martin Cendreda (Technical Director, The Problem Solverz):

How did you come to work on The Problem Solverz?

John Pham, a designer on Problem Solverz, was my man on the inside. He was hounding me for months to apply for a job on the show. But I was a stay-at-home parent at the time, so I was reluctant at first. Eventually I caved. He got me a meeting with Ben Jones, the creator, and Nate Funaro, the producer and they decided to take a chance on me.

How does your work in comics inform your work in animation and vice versa?

Since my position on Problem Solverz (was) mainly editorial, there’s nothing too creative or artistic about it. So comics doesn’t really inform it in any way. But doing comics over the years has taught me a lot about color, which helped me a lot on some Flash animation jobs I had previously, where I had to color backgrounds or come up with color palettes for an episode. As far as animation informing my comics work, there are times when I’m drawing a character in a comic panel, where I feel I need to push the “silhouette” more, and that goes all the way back to my animation school days at UCLA.

What comics have you made?

Publications to date (oldest to newest): Zurik Robot mini (2001), Hi-Horse Anthology (contributor, 2003), Dang #1 (Top Shelf, 2004), Drawn&Quarterly Showcase #4 (2006), Kramers Ergot 7 and 8(contributor), Mome #1-5 (contributor, 2006-2009), Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories: Vol. 2 (contributor, 2008), Best American Comics (2008), Stories #1-3, (self published minis, 2009-2010)

What comics are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on a book length project, but it’s still in the thumbnail stage. I’m hoping to shop that around to publishers sometime this year.