Simpsons Amid Interview-Longwinded Answers pt 1

AMID: 1.) First things first, what's the backstory here? How did you end up animating a Simpsons opening?

Matt Groening and Al Jean asked me to do it. They showed me an opening that Banksy did that satirized the animation production assembly line system in Korea and told me it was really popular, so they wanted to do something similar with me.

Storyboard
At first they just wanted me to do a storyboard and have their regular crew animate it. If we had done it that way, then no one would even have known that I had anything to do with it because it would have ended up on model and all pose to pose. I showed them the Adult Swim shorts I had been doing and pointed out that the way things happened was even more important than what was happening in my work. You can’t write visual performance. You have to actually draw it.














to be continued...

Surprise

I'll put some more production art and rough animation tests later in the week.
Meanwhile here's an interview about t with Amid on Cartoon Brew:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/exclusive-john-k-talks-about-his-simpsons-opening.html#more-50701

I also have a longer version of the same interview that I can put up.

Big House Blues 5 Spumco - smack Stimpy

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/Hairballs3smackStimpy.mov

Big House Blues Spumco 4 - Hwarf "I'm Covered In Hairballs"

When I was first doing storyboards for TV studios they had a theory that you should keep cutting every 2 0r 3 seconds to a new camera distance or angle. This was to "keep something happening" on the screen. I guess it was because there was nothing happening on the screen in the actual drawings or action.

Stimpy swallows his first wad of hairballs

This is all one long scene- the same one from the last 3 posts or so. I've had scenes in my cartoons that were a minute long, just because I had no reason to cut away from what was happening in a certain shot. I did cut in on Stimpy's face to show a close up of him trying to keep from letting out his hairballs, just because I thought it would build more suspense, but otherwise it's all a continuous animated scene from the same angle.

Ever have tears in your eyes after swallowing some nasty puke?
One more dry heave cycle...
antic...
He's really trying to keep in his hairballs, and Ren is getting nervous....

I made a little cycle of Stimpy's "hwarfing", and timed it 3 different ways for him to puke up 3 different hairballs on Ren.







Nickelodeon saw this scene already animated and colored and asked asked me to add a line of dialogue explaining what all the stuff was on Ren. They didn't want the audience to think it was poo or puke. So I added the line "I'm covered in Hairballs". That's why there is no mouth movement.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/Hairballs4JohnPuke.mov

**BTW, TWITTER: Someone is pretending to be me on Twitter. I don't even know what a Twitter or a "tweet is" so don't fall for it.

He's Dead You Eediot!

Here's a couple scenes I animated.
This head turn was based on the funny head turns the cats do in Kitty Kornered when Porky first kicks them out into the snow.
I think this might be the first lip synch scene I ever did where I didn't follow pre-drawn mouth charts.

Ren has a side of his personality that shows pity for dumb animals. Here it is for a moment.

I set the scene up so that you expect Ren to softly tell Stimpy in kind terms what "dead" means.
But then the real Ren takes over. His other side hates ignoramuses.
I used flashing abstract backgrounds and the sound of furious bees to heighten the effect of the shock of the idea of death.
This last scene is animated by Dave Feiss. Very stylish, especially for the time.







http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/JohnDead.mov