Rising Stars of Animation
segments by by Jake Friedman
Originally published in the July 2007 issue of Animation Magazine
Amy Winfrey
Creator, Making Fiends, Nickelodeon
“My show’s got a little bit of a darker feel than Dr. Seuss, but it’s got that same sort of absurdity,” says Amy Winfrey, the creator of Making Fiends, the upcoming new animated series which premieres on Nickelodeon in 2008. Based on the web series of the same name, Winfrey’s show center on two elementary school girls – Charlotte and Vendetta – one of whom makes friends with her natural sweetness, the other creating twisted monster “fiends.” The series is based on Winfrey’s web animation series of the same name, which had developed its own fan base before hitting Nickelodeon’s radar.
“I started making cartoons for the Internet,” she explains. “Nickelodeon had a shorts program at the time, and they had been looking for some people who had done shorts in the past. It ended up just going from pitch bible to TV show. At the time there were only seven shorts on Makingfiends.com, and by the time we were done [negotiations took 2 ½ years] there were twenty. But I had time to develop the characters fully and add more to that world, so it became easy for the network to see what they were getting when they were bringing it to TV.”
Winfrey graduated UCLA in 1997 with a BA in English, then studies animation in the school’s graduate degree program. At the same time, she worked on both the “South Park” series and the theatrical release. Her 2000 thesis project, “Muffinfilms,” and her subsequent project, “Big Bunny,” were immensely popular with online fans. “I ended up selling T-shirts, DVD’s and art prints over the Internet,” she says. “I was making a decent living just doing that.”
For the Nick show, Winfrey is sticking with the same voice cast, story structure and overall visual design as the web cartoons that made her popular. Additionally, as per the web cartoons, she’s composing all the original songs herself. “I like to write. This has been very satisfying for me because I still write a lot of songs, which are similar to my background in poetry. So it’s a good fit.”
Rob Boutilier
Creator, Studio B’s Look What My Sister Dragged In
A strange-looking hairless cat is the real-life inspiration behind Rob Boutilier’s new series Look What My Sister Dragged In, which started its life as a Studio B short and now is in development with Canada’s YTV cabler. The show centers on an evil hairless cat who torments a young boy named Coop, whose sister is completely unaware of the feline’s nefarious motives. “I created the characters in 2003,” says Boutilier. “After eight years of marriage, my wife and I bought a hairless cat, and I was always amazed by people’s reaction to it – these cats are very alien-like. I had the idea that if this cat was truly evil he’d probably try to do me in at some point, and that’s what the cat is doing to the boy in the short.”
Boutilier didn’t start with aspirations in animation. “All I ever wanted to do was a daily comic strip. I got sidelined to animation because I thought it would be good discipline.” After a one-year art program in 1996 following Vancouver film school, Boutilier started storyboarding for AKA Cartoon, working on BBC’s Aaagh! It’s the Mr. Hell Show and Cartoon Network’s famous Ed Edd & Eddy series He was enlisted at Studio B in 2001. “I was a storyboard artist or storyboard supervisor on virtually every project since,” he says.
First conceived for Studio B’s in-house development program, B-Hive, Look What My Sister Dragged In has traveled to festivals around the world and was one of the top 15 projects at last year’s MIPCOM Jr. pilots.
“It’s loony in the classic style of old chase cartoons, but it’s becoming much more than that,” says Boutilier. “It’s storyboard-driven, not script-driven. The artists are encouraged to go crazy with their art.” He adds, “I prefer the real simple stories of chaos spinning off something really simple and really silly. That, I think, is good storytelling.”
Chris Siemasko
Animator, My Adventures with Clöe
A nerdy kid called Timmy befriends a 900-year-old chain-smoking, cranky sea monster in New York-based Chris Siemasko’s hilarious animated pilot,
The idea originally came from the mind of New York comedian Buddy Bolton, who befriended Siemasko and began their collaboration. “When Buddy was in college, he wrote it and performed it as a stage play,” says Siemasko. “Then he stored it in a vault for about a decade; we met, and I loved his ideas right away.”
Siemasko, who graduated from the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 1999, had already worked on projects like Showtime’s Queer Duck and Noggin’s Pinky Dinky Doo” before designing and keying the pilot for Clöe. Canada’s Fatkat studio then came on board to finish the short and helped the duo pitch it to Teletoon. The creators stayed in close contact with studio head and director Gene Fowler and documented the whole production process on a blog. “The process was transparent to anyone who wanted to look it, from voice recordings to animatics,” says Siemasko. “We were able to get a lot of feedback from people over at Fatkat, as well as friends, comedians and total strangers.”
Since then, they have partnered with Just for Laughs to showcase the pilot around the world for possible international distribution. Siemasko adds, “I think people relate to the characters’ sincere friendship, as well as their nauseating personalities and horrific dysfunctions.”