During the Fall Quarter 2016 of my SCAD education, I had joined a motley crew of elite students from the animation, motion media, and illustration majors hand-picked to produce a few animated commercial bumpers for the Cartoon Network late-night program Adult Swim (AS). Essentially, their request was that we students make a few 15-45 second animated shorts for them to air in the coming months along their normal content. The AS studio had worked with SCAD on one other occasion, so there was a standard of quality that they were already expecting for this project.

The entire process from initial pitch to final project delivery was no longer than 10 weeks.

In the first week, students introduced themselves to the AS team --as well as one another-- and got to work researching and brainstorming ideas for the franchises we were given to work with. There were obvious crowd-favorites among said franchises, leading to multiple pitches for some, and none for others. One day, we all vetted each others' pitches before presenting to AS. As the process would unfold, my pitch --for The Venture Bros., originally titled "An 89-Cent Venture"-- was selected for the studio to review, among others.

In short, my pitch was for a quick montage of the eponymous Venture brothers encountering and narrowly surviving numerous Indiana Jones-like traps as they claim a mythical, unseen item. The stinger would be once they retrieve it, Rusty Venture would pawn it off for sale, gaining a mere 89 cents. At the pawn shop, the treasure would be revealed as the Adult Swim logo. To give the short some visual flair, and to make more deadline-friendly use of animation, the short would use a UPA style, with striking color-flats for each character.

When feedback from AS would return, they liked the idea of a UPA visual theme, but were more interested in the execution of a short as pitched by one of teammates, Benjamin Tong. His pitch was for a good ol' fashioned car chase, featuring Brock and Rusty Venture with some Monarch Henchmen in hot pursuit. The short would end with Brock dropping an explosive behind, taking out the Henchmen and ending the short with a bang. So we decided on combining the two together, as per the request of AS.


PRODUCTION
The team for this new short, "Chase Ventures" was comprised of Benjamin Tong from the original pitch, Joshua Roberts, myself, and Alexandra Badiu, who also did work on another short "A Dish Best Served Pickled". Before we could start working on the animation proper, we had to first plot out the animation by creating a storyboard animatic. The next day, I came back with an animatic all of my own. It hit the same beats of the original pitch with some added-in fluff to round out the runtime.

Unfortunately, it was mostly dropped, as the scope of the animation was far too ambitious given our deadline. What was salvaged was the general opening and general pacing, as well as the idea to use the track "Assclamp!" from the official soundtrack of the TV series, which AS did have available for license. And I guess we did get a couple of good jokes out of it too, like the ridiculousness of animating a 360 turnaround or the prevalence of a condor of all things. From there, we let Joshua Roberts take the lead on the animatic from a shot-by-shot basis, where he boarded and choreographed most of the acting for us to follow once we moved on to animation. We made sure to consistently run the brainstorms and thumbnails by Ben so we didn't lose his original vision.

And from that vision, he got to work on developing the art direction. He researched and familiarized himself with the UPA style so he could bring a fresh, yet familiar interpretation of the classic Venture Bros. characters. He focused on Brock and Rusty, with Joshua and I aiding him with designs for the 2 Monarch Henchmen, as well as some car developments. To followup these efforts, Alexandra did background designs to uphold the UPA aesthetic, where they imply more than actually describe.


Once the animatic was off the ground, we all got to work on animating our shots. With the first shot, we immediately ran into an issue with the vehicles. We were worried that we weren't going to be able to keep them on-model given how they move in space. Since this was the opening shot, we had to make sure we spared no questionable motions. So to qualm our concerns, we enlisted the outside aid of another student, Armando Brown. He's a 3D sculpting and modeling student who crafted 3D block-ins of our vehicles. Once he got a good model and rig sent to us, we were able to animate a brief 3d pass and rotoscope it into a 2D motion. Special thanks to Kevin Lim from the short "Blacklight Zone" for lending a quick hand with some of the effects animation work.

With the second shot, Joshua and I split the work between the two of us. I took the first half with the 2 Henchmen as they scramble for both the wheel and the rifle, and he handled the second half where Rusty and Brock react to the oncoming gunfire. The animation is pretty heavy between the two henchmen, so Joshua helped me film reference for the motion and energy of the shot. From there, I got to work on my sequence. Since I was working under subordination to Benjamin's direction, I made a few passes in rough animation to get the flow just right. This actually led to us coming up with some hilarious uses of squash, stretch, and smear animation, as we just couldn't get enough out of the wacky design-freedoms of the henchmen.

In the third shot, we ran into a particularly humorous issue. In the initial pitch, Brock was going to light the stick of dynamite by bringing its fuse up to a cigarette he would be smoking. When we ran it by AS, they let us know that their lawyers had to veto the inclusion of that part. Turns out you can't have people smoking in televised ads, although they could have cigarettes in their hand. It was a detail that neither one of us were 100% behind, but as time kept going, we eventually found attempts to work around the situation behind the cigarette were more trouble than they were worth. So we dropped the cigarette entirely and instead had Brock light the fuse via friction on the side of the car.

With the fourth shot, the deadline for final delivery was starting to quickly approach. While Ben did manage to get the rough keys done for the sequence, time was running short and his attention was needed on other shots. Turns out Shot 2 was the most demanding of the bunch, as animation production on it ran almost for the entirety of the project's development. So we got the help of another outside student, Hannah Schroy, to work on the busywork of clean up detail while we tended to more pressing matters. She was originally a sequential major, so it was a bit of an uphill climb at first running some fundamentals by her, but she caught on very quickly!

For the final shot, we adapted the style frame from our original pitch and turned it into a final splash image with the Adult Swim logo. To make the shot really pop though, we aimed to exaggerate the explosion and let it engulf the horizon for a more visually interesting frame to end on. When it came to animating the explosion, it soon dawned upon the team that no one had really animated an explosion before, or just not very well. I stepped up to handle it though, since I really wanted to extend as much help as possible to meet and match the efforts of everyone else on the team. Animating in straight-ahead again after a long time was somewhat daunting at first, but I managed to get back into the groove and tackle it. From there we moved the final frame of the animation to Photoshop to place in that last bit of flair for the logo drop. I want to extend my thanks to Seth Greenwood --also from the short "A Dish Best Served Pickled"-- for giving me some tips on the Photoshop-finessing of the final snapshot. He was a big help on making it as crisp as it came out.


POST-PRODUCTION

Animation was the biggest beast to slay, but would only make up about half of the project. Upon completing that work, or at least moving schedule along towards it, we looked into bringing a finished look to the table. The second half of the film-tier equation would be adding in the necessary sounds. We initially produced some scratch track audio, alongside the aforementioned theme "Assclamp!" by composer J. G. Thirwell. After getting some pretty okay audio, we sent the picture-locked animation to AS's audio divsion, where the resident Sound Guy blew us away with his revisions. His version added so much more visceral meat to the animation, and I can't thank him enough. I'm just somewhat upset that I never caught his name...

Once the feature was finished --after quite a few sleepless nights, I tell you, we all presented our finalized products to the Adult Swim team. Originally, they were going to only select a few of the produced shorts, but after finding out that they loved just about every short produced, they decided to greenlight all of them to be televised. If I recall correctly, I think I remember the studioheads from AS saying that "Chase Ventures" was their favorite, so that was quite flattering. Its prominent airing cycle on the channel has come and gone by now, but you can see the full short below from Adult Swim's YouTube channel.

Click here if the embedded video isn't working.

Thank you for reading through this recollection of mine regarding the production of the Adult Swim short "Chase Ventures"!