Disaster Baby

That's what we ended up calling this critter. He first appeared in "Hostile Makeover" as a reference to the baby boy of Mary Hanley, the woman who did the storyboard. Pretty soon whenever we needed to put someone in danger we would reuse Disaster Baby. Can you name some of the other episodes he's appeared in ?

Jenny in the 3rd dimension

Thanks for the great links everyone! They lead to some nifty discoveries, including the Japanese version of "Speak no Evil" wherein the Japanese speaking residents of Tremorton are baffled by Jenny's attempts to comunicate in English.

For those wondering how Jenny and the extended cast of the show might look in 3-d, we discovered this fairly elaborate fan film, "Not My Day" by Henry Blackshear jr.

Jenny around the world

All this travelling has gotten me thinking. One of the coolest things about making a show for a studio like Nickelodeon, is that your work will eventually be shown all over the world. However, each countrie's Nickelodeon is its own company, and even though Rob and I have asked many times we never get to see the international versions of our show.
Recently I found this; a clip of Teenage Robot featuring the theme song and characters speaking in German. For those those of us used to the english version, there are some fun surprises, including Tuck's more mature voice.
This Blog seems to have visitors from around the world, does anyone have links to clips of their local versions of Robot?

Time Flies

It's been several weeks since I returned from Japan and I have been meaning to post much sooner than this. Finally fed the pix from my new digital camera to my Mac -all 1400 of them! This is my wife and me on the Shinkansen from Himeji to Kyoto. Another bullet train is passing us by while we stop momentarily in a station. A totally accidental image but a great result.

Although I'll be paid through next week, this is my last day of real work on MLAATR. I mix the final show today. It's a good one and although there is no real series conclusion. It ends with a comical joke that could explain why things don't continue.

Alex and I will continue to post on the Roblog. He has been very busy moving to a new place but when he is settled I expect he will have some new treats for you all. I will try to post a few goodies as well before they kick me out of Nick.

Count on us!

Hey everyone, we're back and feeling very refreshed, thanks for asking.
I wanted to alert faithful mlaatr followers thats this week's installation of the Channel Frederator podcast features "The Vampire Who Came to Dinner" one of the six Mina and the Count shorts Rob Renzetti directed before creating Teenage Robot (1 for Cartoon Network and 5 for Nickelodeon). Besides being a great cartoon, it also has a soft spot in my heart because it was one of the very first times Rob and I ever collaborated on anything. Check it out here or subscribe through itunes (it's free).
Also check out some of our favorite classic cartoons on the the ReFrederator podcast, curated by my own father, Dave Kirwan.

DON'T CRY!

Rob and myself are going to do a little traveling to enjoy our respective time-off, he in Japan and myself in Europe. Therefore, the roblog will be taking a little vacation as well, for a little over three weeks from the date of this post. Don't despair, it'll definitely be back, I've just got too much cool stuff still to post.
Au revoir and sayonara!

Color scheming

A color scheme could come from anywhere. A movie poster, an old paper-back cover, a toy robot, someone's shirt, it doesn't matter just as long as it creates the right mood for scene. In fact, we're kind of like visual dj's, but instead of sampling beats from an old LP, we'll dig into our comic boxes and bookshelves. Or maybe I just want to make my job sound a lot hipper than it is.

Cluster Prime time

This week various alumni from Teenage Robot will be submitting work to be considered for Emmy nomination. There was only one episode eligible for submission this time around, and happily it's "Escape from Cluster Prime", one of my very favorites. Our crew has always worked very hard to put the "special" into a special, and as our longest episode, this was no exception. We had discussed the idea of Jenny on a robot planet almost from the very beginning, and Just to make sure it would truly capture the imagination, our design crew was sequestered to conference room several days for visual development and group brainstorming sessions, something extremely rare within a hectic tv production schedule.


I loved conceiving my first ever "movie-title" sequence. Rob actually had to fight a few battles to get front-end credit for nearly the whole crew, who were surprised by the results at the premiere screening.

This sequence was meant to evoke Disney's world-war II era propaganda films. Kudos to Bryan for winning the most disturbing Jenny contest.

Real live storyboards!

I thought that there might be some out there curious to see what an entire storyboarded sequence looks like before it's sent to Korea to be animated. Then again, I've been wrong before. The production of "Victim of Fashion" fell between seasons one and two, and we were able to spend a little extra time with it (as a result, it expanded into a half hour special). This was especially exciting to me, because it meant that I'd get to do some storyboarding on the show myself (this happens very rarely), collaborating with Brandon Kruse. Here's one of my favorite sequences I got to work on.

Background information

Last month on the blog we gave a well-deserved plug to the vivid color stylings by Seonna for the show's backgrounds, But it's definitely worth pointing out that much work goes into these settings well before the paint-tubes are even opened. Joseph Holt and Chris Tsirgiotis were the uber-talented scribblers responsible for most of the BG layouts on the show. Their drawings always struck the delicate balance of being functional, accommodating the actions of the characters as determined in the storyboard, and of reinforcing the highly stylized feel of the series. With clever cheats of perspective (or lack thereof), whimsical background signage, heaping doses of fanciful deco-era architecture and endlessly inventive shapes and patterns, every background was worked towards creating a believable and entertaining world for our characters to inhabit.
"Around the world in Eighty Pieces" was a great opportunity for the BG boys to stretch the "future-deco" look beyond the bounds of Tremorton and reshape the world according to their whims.