Kenosha Festival of Cartooning

If you enjoy cartoons, you ought to head over to Kenosha later this year where you'll get your chance to bathe yourself in cartoon grooviness. Please check out the lovely Anne Hambrock's Kickstarter page for more information!

ON THE AIR sneak preview

The BBC's ON THE AIR third season will air sometime around Christmas, it seems, and you can catch a sneak peek in this exclusive trailer. The 2D animation is by me with character setup and rigging done by the fantastic folks at Club Cocoanut, and the stop motion and production design is by the Belfast animation studio of Flickerpix.




In other news, my good friends Chris Hanily, Brett Zabel, Tad Allard and I just got back from running the Tucson Marathon this weekend. Happily we all finished and can still walk, for the most part. I'll post a couple of pictures soon. Congratulations, guys!

Cheers,

K

KaboingTV- "Mind Your Tongue"- Frog in a Suit- 3p 36

Think big, think outside of the box!

Kaboing TV stands to spread cartoon goodness to animation lovers everywhere via the web. Animated cartoons for animated cartoon lovers by people who love animated cartoons. No suits. No meddling. All monkey business. The good kind. Kaboing TV needs your help: watch, comment, spread the word to your cartoon-loving friends. Link, link, link again. Animated cartoons are good for you, animated cartoons are good for me. Animated cartoons are proven* to make you 52.5% less cranky and 78.3% more attractive due to the youthful, goofy grin on your previously dour and furrowed mug. Get out there and hug an animator! Get out there and hug a cartoon lover! Get out there and be animated yourself! Live animatedly, love animatedly, love life animatedly! VIVA ANIMATION! Woo!



Whew. Ok - I'm back. Now, let's get out there and spread the animation loving.

Kaboing TV!

Cheers!

K

Frog In a Suit-Ep 35 " Tricky Business"- KaboingTV.com

KaboingTV- "All Buzzed Up" Episode 34

Frog in a Suit premiere on Kaboing TV!

Black and white background

A black and white background for a character design set I'm working on.

In other news, Michael Jantze will be teaching a New Media Master Class at the Charles M. Schulz Museum on January 8, 2011. Michael knows a few things about new media, having been at the forefront since early in his syndicated comic strip career. Look to the Charles M. Schulz Museum's website for details.

Happy 2011!

Good luck,

K

Sketchy Ice Creams

Really fun little short from Bird Box Studios. It's just a joy to watch.

Jantze Studios wraps on episode 35 of Frog in a Suit

Five minutes, five people, five weeks. That sums up Jantze Studios animation production on Joe Murray's Frog in a Suit.

Animating Joe Murray's designs is a gas - animating Joe Murray's designs to an awesome voice cast is even... uh, gassier. Look for Frog in a Suit on KaboingTV.com - coming soon to the internet near you!

Good luck!

K

Help Launch an All-Cartoon Web Channel! UPDATED (x3)

UPDATE #3: Ten days to go, folks - Joe Murray's project is at 94% of his $16,800 goal. Jantze Studios (yours truly being director of animation) stands to be the production company for Frog in a Suit, and KaboingTV stands to drive a new revolution in animation. Even if you can't contribute to the Kickstarter campaign, please help spread the word! Do some blogging, linking, story writing... everyone get the word out about KaboingTV and Frog in a Suit!

Joe Murray of "Rocko's Modern Life" and "Camp Lazlow" is working on launching an all-cartoon web channel called KaboingTV.com, and you can become part of cartoon history! "How's that?" you may ask. The answer can be found at Murray's Kickstarter page.

“I’m trying to produce the first episodes without outside funding that comes with strings attached. It’s also my wish to have you the audience, plus fellow animators be my producers rather than funding sources that don’t love cartoons as much as you do.”

"Frog in a Suit", set to launch KaboingTV, will be funded by the Kickstarter effort, which as of 5.12.2010 stands at 55% of the goal with 24 days to go. UPDATE: I was going to wait a few days with an update, but in just a day Murray's project has gone from 55% to 61%. END UPDATE UPDATE 2: If you're part of helping reach this goal, you're awesome. Frog in a Suit and KaboingTV are that much closer today, with 73% of the goal reached and 19 days to go. Be part of the new cartoon resurgence! It's a proven* fact that cartoon lovers make better lovers, period. END UPDATE Backers of Joe's effort have several funding levels to choose from, ranging from $5 all the way to $10,000 or more.

“So look at your pledge also as a vote to have more episodes of Frog in a Suit, and to have a website that you can go to and depend on, to give you hilarious, quality driven, irreverent cartoons.”

Murray notes that once funding is complete it will be a matter of months to launch the site and begin pulling in enough traffic to woo advertisers and more sponsors.



*ok... "proven" is anecdotal and even somewhat hyperbolic but c'mon... it's true, for the most part. Except for this guy. Probably not true for him.

Bunny says "aaaahhhh"

Spent a few minutes animating in Flash... and ended up with a bunny.

Fun-time Animation Machine

The latest reel.

Music is by Lou Barlow, from his album "Emoh", used with permission.

Biplane fly-by

A bit of biplane fun.

I've been a fan of warbirds for as long as I can remember, so this was a fun one to put together. The airplane itself is kind of a mish-mash of a few different kinds of WWI fighters, most notably the Spad XIIIand the Model 75 "Stearman" (the former of which I have a smallish die-cast model of on my desk and the latter I had as one of my first glue-together model kits... now long gone but not forgotten.)

Good luck!

K

A Time For All Seasonings

An old friend and former coworker from Reelworks in Minneapolis has debuted his newest film, "The Shaker Brothers". Beautifully sweet traditional character animation set to a wonderfull, whimsical piano track all wrapped up in a early 20's vaudeville period look. Head on over and take a trip back in time, why don't you?

Good luck!

K

Jantze Studios & Baby Blues

A short Baby Blues piece of fun. There's public education, and then there's public education.

Happy Friday & good luck,

K

MMAA Animated! Film Festival this weekend

Just got the word that "Mr. Lux: At Your Service" will be showing this weekend at the Minnesota Museum of American Art's "Animated! Film Festival" showcasing local and regional animated shorts. Thanks to the MMAA for hosting the event and I'm looking forward to catching up with old friends and hopefully meeting some new ones.

'Cause animators are cool cats...

Good luck,

K

Mr. Lux: Cannes, Silver Create Awards, now #1 on YouTube

Just saw that Mr. Lux: At Your Service has been featured in the #1 spot on YouTube. I don't know how long that lasts, but hey, it's fun! [UPDATE] Now it's at #3, so they do change things up regularly, it appears. Thanks to everyone who left real comments! [end update]

It was dubbed "Batman Tuesday" at the studio yesterday. So I drew Batman. [UPDATE #2] I snuck in and nicked Michael's and Chris' Batman drawings while they were industriously chugging the extra-greasy distraction-coffee I set out.

No artist I've met yet can resist the extra-greasy coffee. Enjoy! [end update]

Kelly:

Michael:

Chris:

Lisa:

Good luck,

K

Mr. Lux: Now We're Cooking!

The second episode starring the indefatigable Mr. Lux!

There's hope that we'll see more of Mr. Lux in the near future...

Good luck,

K

More festival action

Should you be in the Big Apple this weekend, stop by the Animation Block Party on Sunday to see Mr. Lux in all his festival glory.

If you miss him there, you can still catch him at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. More on that later.

Happy Friday,

K

Cartoon Brew? [Updated]

Ut-oh... what's happened with Cartoon Brew? It's offline, and offline hard. NOTHING of it is up, and it's been at least a good 12 hours by now. Anyone know the story? Simple ISP burp, or something more sinister?

Good luck,

K

[UPDATE] Whew - never mind. They had tech problems (severe ones at that - possibly hacked) and are back up. Enjoy.