here's the youtube embed for toxie:

I drew some original sketches, thinking toxie could maybe be a turtle. Because I love turtles.

Still have Toxie coughing up change and all that.

But we decided to go in more of a monster direction to keep with the feel of the first animation. I think it ended up being a better design anyhow. More of a mischievous gremlin-type character.

from there I started building models for everything. Lots of hand-drawn elements scanned and puppeted in after effects. For me this is the fastest way to work. Also I animated a stock bounce that could be reused and adjusted into lots of different scenes:

At the same time, I'm thumbnailing story boards to the audio track:

Then cleaning these ideas up into boards for an animatic. I try to keep the boards clean enough to serve as really bad layouts for animation, but loose enough to draw quickly.

Then I just animate the after effects model over the boards. the finished still is below.

All in all we had a little over 3 weeks to do everything. 1 week for boards, 1/2 for models, and the rest of the time to animate.

i haven't posted in awhile--but I made this cartoon! This one is for NPR's Planet Money. It's about Toxie, a personified toxic asset that helped burst the housing bubble.

The embed is a little funky, but you can see the full cartoon here. Big thanks to connie and robin for helping out. We had about zero time, but we somehow made the deadline. And huge thanks to planet money for giving us something wacky to make.

I'll post some more making-of stuff and a youtube embed soon. For now it's nap time.