1. What’s new in the Noble Universe? What are you most excited about right now?

   • Well, I gotta say – going to Cannes in Paris and seeing France for the first time is really cool. And the fact that I will be promoting “Mort” (aka Hope Springs Eternal) to all of the buyers there is just crazy. So, that one’s pretty high on the list.
     

   • Akiko Ashley and I are working on developing a $40 million animated feature. We’ve got some 3D character modelers helping us out, and we’re working on positioning me as the director. That’s huge, that’s just awesome.

   • I just finished my first children’s book, Harry the Bear in Harry’s Cosmic Surf Adventure. It’s a story about an action sports bear journeying into space for the perfect waves. It was great - I got to go to the LA Times Book Fair and sign copies for the kids. There are actually three more books that I’m working on which will be up this summer.

2. We hear you’re quite the jet-setter these days – something about Seattle and France…You wanna share a bit about this, Mr. Noble, International Man of Mystery?

   • Yeah, well – aside from LA and Paris, of course, I will probably head up to Seattle for the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF), which should be really fun. Aside from the traveling, another thing that is really amazing with these festivals is the opportunities they provide. Hope Springs Eternal (aka “Mort”) just won the USA Film Festival in Dallas, TX, this past weekend, making it eligible for an Oscar nomination, which is really exciting. "Mort" has been accepted to 10 film festivals, including The Palm Springs Shorts Fest, another Oscar booster coming up this August. I am making all sorts of cool connections along the way, finding people who want to collaborate. Running my film through the festival circuit is a great process for networking and exposure.

3. Mort and his ghastly gang seem to be garnering a lot of love – care to chat a bit about how this animation was born? What inspired it, how did you decide to animate it, what tools did you use, etc?

   • Ten years ago, back in Seattle, the idea for "Mort" was born. Hope Springs Eternal must have been stewing subconsciously for awhile, because literally – out of the blue – the whole story hit me. I was feeling pretty damn depressed, because even after finishing my first short and doing some freelance work, I still couldn’t seem to break through in animation. I had just made Living With Ridalyn, and tried to sell it and find work, but no one seemed to care. Then one morning I woke up hungover on my friend’s couch with the entire film in my head. I didn’t want to wake everyone up, so I’m running around desperately looking for paper and pencil. Finally, I found this bright, cheery sunflower memo pad and sickly cute bumblebee pen and here I am writing out this dark storyline…"Loser trying to commit suicide, can’t pull it off" and writing gag after gag based on that premise. I still have the note pad pages – it was just the perfect irony.

   • The biggest influence on the style of animation for this film was Terry Gilliam, the guy who did all the Monty Python pieces. They take this perfect, airbrushed piece of art, and they just move it and slide it around – South Park is actually based on the same concept with the cut-outs inspired by Terry Gilliam and Monty Python. “So,” I was thinking, “what if I just spent a lot of time perfecting the pieces and then animated just enough; refining Terry Gilliam-inspired limited animation into something slightly more elegant. If you’ll notice, Mort never takes a single step – he just magically happens to be in the right place and the camera moves in on him or away from him.

4. "Mort " is, admittedly, macabre, right? So, I’ve heard you speak a bit about the freedom you have in animating for yourself and other adults versus some of the limitations that you might run into when you are animating for children. Would you care to expand on this at all?

   • In the end, I just think, “Let’s make this really funny.” I guess I just pick a theme, and the theme is inherently going to be more for kids or more for adults. Like when I did Ridalyn, I was going for Saturday Morning, bubblegum, hilarity for the sake of hilarity – that was the point of the whole film, Saturday morning silly stuff, and with the bright colors and gags, it all flowed more toward kids…so if a more adult-oriented gag popped into my head, I’d instinctively tweak the idea toward a kid friendly version – not so much because I was worried about the rating the MPAA was going to give it, but because I wanted to stay true to the theme I was working in.

   • With "Mort," I had all this cool stuff that was really geared toward adults, and I really wanted to emphasize the darkness to contrast the joy. This whole theme made it more of an adult film, full of stuff that kids probably wouldn’t even get, just based on the nature of the theme and story I chose.

   • The next one I’m working on is about an Indian brave, The Legend of Twisted Tree – so I’m going in a whole different direction with a rhyming story kind of theme. This one is more of a fable/fairy tale leaning toward the storybook realm – a happy kids’ book brought to life. So I feel like there’s really no sense in adding adult content, simply because it doesn’t fit that theme.

   • As far as “freedom” is concerned, it’s all free for me! Limitations don’t really come into play until you start dealing with networks and movie studios, because now you’ve got a million regulations that come down on you; like the animated characters must wear seat belts, bike helmets – sometimes you just feel like saying, “Are you kidding me?! It’s a cartoooon!!” At the network where I worked they were driven to be the TV station that serves as surrogate parents leaving nothing in their programming to question or discuss with your kids, but the whole point of cartoons is to escape and be able to do stuff that you couldn’t do in the real world! Now, if I want to, I can – and then I put it in festivals and they give me awards for it. I actually learned this principle from Chuck Jones. He and the Looney Tunes animation crew at Warner Bros. Termite Terrace only worried about making themselves laugh; they didn’t worry about whether it was inappropriate – they left that up to the people after them. Good animations have a way of finding their own audience, no matter how “inappropriate” they appear to be to the mass audience. Look at Beavis & Butt-Head. In the first episode, they are playing baseball with a live frog as the ball. I’m sitting there watching it at an animation festival cracking up, but also thinking, “who on earth is going to play this kind of content on a large scale?” Then MTV sees it and says, “Yeah, we’ll play that.” And it turns into a wild success! If you’d pitched that idea to any studio, they would just show you the door. So, there’s your proof: if it’s funny to you, chances are it will find its own audience.

5. What else have you got in store with "Mort" in the upcoming months? What does the crystal ball hold for our poor, morbid Mort?

   • I actually do have two more episodes of "Mort" storyboarded and ready to animate. And, believe it or not, at The Cannes Short Film Corner Festival they are asking us to videotape ourselves giving a one to two minute pitch of our animations and what the series would be like, along with a clip of the animation – so I am ahead of the game! I have this whole idea, a kind of Road Runner and Coyote concept where Mort chases Vida, trying to win her heart, and fails miserably, again and again. The idea is that everyone feels better about themselves when they see how bad he’s got it.

6. You have obviously put a lot of work into "Mort" – how do you do it? What keeps you inspired, energized, and moving forward?

   • For me, it’s just the relief of having it done, but as soon as you start getting to the end, you can’t help thinking about how great it’s going to be to use all the cool stuff you’ve learned once you get to the next project. I start thinking, “Let’s try a whole new genre!” I always find myself getting excited about the next challenge because it’s always an opportunity to exercise what you’ve learned.

7. Along those same lines, do you have a favorite mantra or piece of advice that you live by? Is there one piece of advice that you apply to every animation?

For every piece of animation… I guess there are two things that are key:

• It’s got to be dynamic – animation goes from wherever it is to waaay out there. You have to exaggerate everything – otherwise, there’s no sense in animating it. You gotta emphasize everything you do; gags, character design – you just want to pull it all the way out there and stretch it as far as you can, because that’s where you get your rewards. That’s why we have cartoons – to do things that you can’t do in reality. Wile E. Coyote falls off of a 500-foot cliff, lands 5 feet deep into the ground, and THEN this giant rock lands on top of him.

• You gotta finish whatever scene you’re working on before you can judge how good it is– I find that I get halfway through the scene, it looks like crap, and I almost want to give up and start over. It always proves to be true that if you can just finish it off, it almost always comes together again – whatever you do, don’t give up halfway through; always go all the way to the end before you scrap it. I still find myself doubting whether a scene or even motion of a character in the animation is going to work as I’m doing it, and I just have to remind myself that it’s always the same, and I have to just ride it out. I’m amazed at how it almost always comes together once I get the scene done.

8. You are quite an accomplished animator – how did you get to where you are today? What words of wisdom do you have to share with aspiring animators everywhere?

   • Today, more than ever and continuing forward, it’s much easier to learn how to do this stuff on your own. For me, the real education was that I watched a lot of animation, and I broke it down. I would stop the tapes – because all we had was VHS tapes back then – and scroll through it frame by frame. You could SEE the exaggeration in the characters – short, flat, tall – you could see how far they were pushing things to get that snap. If I were to teach animation, that’s what I would do. I would just scrub through animations frame by frame and have the students observe and recreate.

   • And the software today is so much better than pencil. When I was working on my senior thesis, frame by frame software tools just didn’t exist, so I had to actually get cels and get a bunch of people with white gloves and paint the cells and flip them back over again….and if it hit anything we had to try to clean it up – it almost drove me out of animation! I remember thinking that I was going to get really rich and then pay someone to do all of those parts for me. Software, though, allows anyone starting today to leapfrog past all the nonsense, all the technical, pain-in-the-butt stuff, and gets the focus back on film-making. Artists are able to focus less on the hassles of animating, and more on story and characters and creating a fun-looking image. The technical part of actually how to go about animating by hand – you can learn it, it can be taught, but also it’s instinctual. You learn so much from just watching others like Tim Burton, Chuck Jones (my #1 absolute favorite animator), Jon K, Terry Gilliam – the list could go on forever. The point is that you just gotta be a sponge and absorb as much information as possible and squeeze it back out.

9. You are an active supporter and promoter of animation and even established a group called Animation Army. What’s new and happenin’ with this group?

   • We’ve got some cool stuff lined up, and we’ve actually got our next meeting set up. We’ve established ourselves enough now, that they are coming to us; hosts, sponsors, presenters etc. I guess it’s kind of that, “If you build it, they will come” mentality, right? We’ve got about 550 members on our Evite list, typically 70-80 people show up at each meeting, and we are continuing to grow.

   • I think this is due to the fact that all are welcome – it doesn’t matter if you are a CEO or a student with one course under your belt. We try to level the playing field, to get people together and to get ideas together. Maybe a CEO is actually struggling because she can’t find fresh content, and here we have a kid with a dream who wows the CEO, giving her what she needs and fulfilling the kid’s dream. There are amazing opportunities out there if you are open-minded enough to show up and try something different.

   • We are actually scheduled to have our next meeting at Writer’s Boot camp in Venice. We’re gonna team up with other groups, the One Plus Hub, Women in Animation, and, of course, Writer’s Bootcamp to host this big event with all these groups coming together to talk about screen writing for animation. This is going to take place in July.

10. Anything else you’d like to share with the animation community?

Make stuff! Get out there! Go! The more animation and animators we have out there, the cooler and more diverse the content and whole community will become!

A token of advice from an accomplished animator: Find what you love and focus on it. Through his industry experience, he’s learned it’s better to be great at one thing, than good at many. "Also, don’t be in a rush," he advises, "explore different industries and styles." Dorian’s actions attest to this, as he has produced an award-winning script that is being adapted into a graphic novel scheduled for release later this year.

Kick-starting his career as a designer and producer at Universal Images in Detroit, Dorian has had his share of agency experience – working with the likes of JWT, BBDO, and Donor. After completing his BFA in Animation & Digital Media, he took his unique style and design aesthetic to L.A. to become Designer/Director of yU&co of Hollywood California, and soon graduated to Creative Producer of Firstborn. Dorian’s work has since gone global – you can find his creations in such magazines and books as Digit, EFX Art & Design, Layers, Texturing Concepts & Techniques and Exploring Motion Graphics.

Nowadays, Dorian is an avid designer focusing on Art Direction for video game development, and says he couldn’t live without Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, and, of course, his trusty iPhone. He currently works for Pandemic Studios – a division of Electronic Arts – working on EA’s next AAA title, due for world wide release later this year. Check out Dorian’s work which includes some great promos for Nike, Marvel Comics, and Miami Ink.

Dorian sends out an invitation to the MyToons community: "Feel free to get in touch. I love collaborating, creating and giving advice."

Want an inside look at the world of Dorian Compo? Peep his blog at http://loyaltydivision.com/blog.

Thanks for sharing, Dorian!

Jeroen experimented with cell animation and CG animation as a means of returning to his great passion, stop motion. He prefers building real sets, props, armatures and characters, and physically building up the animation frame by frame.

His amazing digitally shot stop motion animation, Awareness, was inspired by his fascination with old expressionistic films from 1920s, German movies, and by artists like Tim Burton.

For Jeroen’s moving animation, The Miraculous Pear Tree, he pioneered the usage of digital SLR cameras in combination with real-time video preview. This ended up in an animation shot in 2K RAW format and was later scaled down to 1080p HD.

The New York Film Festival contacted him after seeing his Tibetan fairy tale animation, The Miraculous Pear Tree, on atomfilms.com. Suddenly an avalanche of interest descended on Jeroen.

“More and more people contacted me about the screenings and about my work. Everybody in New York was very enthusiastic about the screening and impressed with the time it took for me to create this Tibetan fairytale,” he said.

So impressed, in fact, that the New York International Film Festival awarded The Miraculous Pear Tree "Best Animated Short, International" - Congratulations, Jeroen!

Currently, Jeroen and his studio are working on two educational animations for young children. “We’re making a stop-motion animation about the letter ‘A’ and a combined 3D, Flash, stop-motion one about the letter ‘F.’ And we’re working on a series of informative animations for a house corporation on DVD, and on a DVD with special animated menus for a Dutch folk-pop band.

In addition, the studio gives presentations about animation (the next one is in The Hague on April 12) and participates in animation exhibitions. The exhibition in Groningen (NL) will also feature renowned Dutch animators Michael Dudok de Wit, Paul Driessen, Han Hoogerbrugge and Adriaan Lokman.

In the near future, Jeroen hopes to make a longer stop-motion animation, and says he’s in the conceptual phase for the storyline. “This will also will be a fairytale. And we’ll keep working on commercials, video clips, kid’s animations and more."

Stop by and congratulate Jeroen on his win at the New York International Film Festival, and be sure to see The Miraculous Pear Tree for yourself!

Growing up in the midst of three brothers – two older, one younger – Katie never had rights to the remote control. This, however, proved providential as Katie soaked up the stop motion videos that ran rampant on MTV during the late 80’s and early 90’s – videos that left an impression on young Katie; “I love the look and the feel of Stop Motion animation as opposed to the other mediums of animation. I feel like the characters have a soul; it’s like they are right there with me.”

Perhaps because of her own experience with and introduction to stop motion, Katie enjoys animating for younger viewers: “I think it is a challenge for me to find what keeps kids connected to animation.” After finishing “Baby Layne,” an animation inspired by her 1 ½ year old nephew, Katie realized how much the real Baby Layne connected with the animation: “His reaction was more exciting than the animation itself…It was great seeing his eyes light up like that.”

Katie thrives on hearing and seeing this kind of emotional reaction in the audience. “When I showed "Baby Layne" at the KidsFilmFest in Brooklyn, my very first film festival experience, I heard children laughing and talking with the baby – it was crazy. Then, just as the dog was revealed, I heard a father happily sigh a few seats down. It was amazing! Not only did it reach the younger audience, but the parents were identifying with it as well. Just seeing their excitement made me know why I create animation and why it is worth is to keep making stop motion animation.”

This drive proves effective – current works include pre-production of a Circus animation based on conquering fear and the completion of a grant project, “The Adventures of Super Puff.” Also on the to-do list, Katie once again returns to the younger demographic, aiming to use her animation to help children in need; “I want to give my animation a greater purpose.”

Justin wrote the script, created storyboards, and designed, sculpted, and modeled the characters while Shel is working on creating the sets and taking on a big part of the production and editing process. Since the duo has the additional daily responsibilities of family and careers, the majority of film work happens in the wee hours of midnight to 6 in the morning – talk about dedication! Tools of the trade: their current project is being shot frame by frame with a Nikon d70 still camera and captured by MonkeyJam, an open source frame capturing tool.

So, why stop motion? Justin loves all animation, but stop motion holds a special place in his heart. “I worked in CG for 12 years and I had a breakdown a couple of years ago,” he said. “I hated how all the art I created over the last decade could disappear in the matter of seconds.” The ethereal yet tangible physicality of Stop Motion seemed to be a perfect fit for his next film. While he wasn’t well versed in the medium, he dove head first into the world of stop motion and picked it up naturally.

“It feels completely like MAGIC when I have a puppet convincingly come to life,” Justin said. “I like the improvisation that happens in Stop Motion…the puppets have minds of their own!” In the future, Justin plans to take a 2 year hiatus from the industry to concentrate on a feature stop motion film with Shel – his ultimate dream.

Justin leaves the MyToons community with a bit of advice: “Anything is possible! All you have to do is take a step. DO IT!” He adds, “Hard work is the easy part! NO EXCUSES!”

Take a sneak peek at clips from the upcoming "Gerald’s Last Day" below or check out some more of Justin’s work here

What’s up next for the Jimi Homeless Experience? Jon, along with Josh Curtis and Jason DeCorse of Plastic Dog, are heading back into the studio to record a full length musical parody Off-Broadway with lyrics written to “reflect the state-of-mind of a homeless drug-addict living in skid row.” You can even catch the band playing live gigs around Hollywood – Awesome!

Another aspiration: Jon would like to put a team together to produce a stop motion animated feature or a series of shorts as a way to pitch to production companies who have the money to back his endeavors (We smell collaboration among the MyToons community…!). Be sure to visit Jon’s MyToons profile – we’re sure you’ll love little Jimmi Homeless’ creative way of cooking beans!