toxie's back!

here's a promo I did for npr's planet money podcast. Last year you might remember the cartoon I made about toxie, their pet toxic asset.

Well, turns out that pool of mortgages became the subject of a lawsuit, and the good folks at planet money could potentially earn $75,000 as a result. Which they would give to charity.

here's the full podcast!

And here are a few sketches. We already had the toxie model in after effects, so I could crank the entire thing out in a couple hours.

thanks to connie for letting me work on this instead of going to see the lion king with her.

this week on This American Life you can hear the full story of Toxie!

Sit back, relax, and listen to some depressing news about the state of our economy, as lightheartedly investigated and reported by the amazing David Kestenbaum and Chana Joffe-Walt. And review the cartoon it inspired!

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.