And here's some more production art for the Comedy Bang! Bang! title sequence. One of the most time-consuming aspects of this project wasn't the drawing itself, but designing all the little characters that, in the end, are on the screen for a fraction of a second.
It was the most time-consuming, but easily the most fun. (It's a pleasant rarity when things work out that way, isn't it?) My personal favorite is probably the Bird-fish-man-face-butt Creature. Poor guy. He seems like he'd always be late on his taxes and constantly wiping mustard from his plumage.
No actual or fictional animals were harmed during the production of this animation. And only one reference photo was ever used. This is it (seriously), for the dog in the side car bit:
After our hero rides into the face of madness, the screen explodes. These were some of my early art notes on how to make things explode (a seemingly simple animation whose difficulty I now appreciate on a far deeper level).
To finish things up with something done for the show outside of the title sequence, here's an ultimately unused, finely-coiffured chihuahua.
Have fun watching the premiere tonight on IFC. (Or iTunes, etc. thereafter...)
Being a big fan of the CBB podcast, I was honored to do the title sequence, set art, logos, and other little bits and pieces for the television show. And I thought that today and tomorrow, in honor of the premiere, I'd post some of the production artwork produced along the way.
The title sequence started as inauspiciously as possible, scrawled out on a tiny piece of paper taped to my drafting table. Yes, this is all thirty seconds of the original title sequence (thought a few changes were made along the way). No, I have no idea how this could be even remotely understandable to anyone other than me.
Once the rough idea was conceived and fleshed out then came a lot of penciling. As in: a lot. One of the great luxuries of comics is leaving out all the moments in between... in animation, you're not so lucky. So even for this short piece, there was several weeks at the board.
There's absolutely no way I would have gotten through the whole process if not for the inking skill of Jim Rugg (master of all things ink-related) and Eric Reynolds (of Fantagraphics fame, who's no slouch with a brush himself). And of course there was the endless effort of the three-headed animation workhorse Bindledog (Jeff Zwirek, Adam Zwirek, and Jay Gish) who put the whole mess together in Flash and did approximately ten million tests to fine tune it all. Those three are to be commended for not cooking me on a spit for the insane hours I made them work.
Below you can watch an episode in its entirety, including the finished, colored title sequence. And I'll post some production art and character designs from the show tomorrow.
Over on madmoizelle.com, Pénélope Bagieu (who has her own site well worth perusing) reviews the French edition of Life with Mr. Dangerous (published by Actes Sud).
Via Forbes, a story about how Harvard Book Store is making digital book sales and sales in their physical store work hand in hand. It's pretty ingenious stuff and something I certainly hope other stores will look into more in the future.
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