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[–]scotchbingington 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Tell us more about the animation you did...

[–]JasonCarswell[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I animated on enough cereal commercials to make you diabetic and later realized they were all pushing sugar and theft and often bad grammar. Most cereals were soooo good someone just had to steal them. Cookie Crisp started out with the cookie crook, then the cookie crook with his crook dog, then the dog lost the mask. "Me want Honeycomb!" Really!?! I honestly don't know if this was just stupid ad men (and sooooo many of them are stupid yes men who love underling yes men), if there was some financial precedent and template, or if there was an organized malicious plan from the corporate overlords. (50 cereals to chose from. 2 political parties, only 1 away from a dictatorship. The illusion of choice.) Ironically by the time I realized this a few years in and made my decision I never got a chance to put my foot down to say no to immoral children's commercials. Coming down the pipe they just never came my way again. I'm glad I didn't have to create studio drama.

So much fast junk food it makes me sick thinking about it. I was consumed by the craft and spectacle of bright shiny glam in a plastic artificial world and sooo eager to please with my tenacity and talent. I wasn't thinking about the corporate consumerist superficial culture.

Countless cell phone services, cable services, and dial up services. We'd be animating on several competing mobile services so when a client came in some of us had to turn off our monitors for their meeting so we'd take a break. James Earl Jones (aka voice of Darth Vader) asked if we wanted to read his fortune because we had a reflection sphere to map out the specular lighting to apply to our Verizon animated computer monitors that complained about slow dial up. We were too shocked and speechless. I worked on a Victoria Secrets commercial but was pissed I didn't get to go to the shoot.

Soooo many "sexy" razors, shampoos with vitamins, maxipads with wings, dancing contact lenses, allergy medicines, vitamin mosaics, pet flee repellent, macho strong sponges, a school bus full of children skidding out onto a frozen lake to crack through the ice and sink, and countless music videos. I refused to work on the first Zoloft anti-depressant commercial, not because it's Big Pharma poison, but because they wouldn't let me redesign their crappy depressing character you still see to this day. Apparently there was a lot of market research on it. I just thought it was a terrible design. A lot of famous directors do commercials but their names are never on them. Many of them do fuck all and only show up once or twice. Many of them are a nuisance offering shitty ideas or indecision oblivious to the endless hours of wasted work they create. Depending on the studio, anywhere from a quarter to a half of the directors are actually very competent - and half of them are fantastic people besides (ie. my role model heroes).

Sadly, I never did get to archive off much of my work. After my animation it often went to rendering then post production and I was lucky to grab whatever scraps I could as I was always busy working on the next thing in the pipe.

YouTube deleted a bunch for some reason so here's all that's left on my old YouTube account (I forgot the password that Google made me change ~2011), a better quality version of my solo rigged and animated M&Ms commercial (rendered by another guy and based of the famous designer Jonathan Adler who showed up maybe twice to say "it freaked his shit out"), I worked on this short a bit in 2004 and this short a bit in 1999 or 2000, and ironically they wouldn't fucking recycle in the studio, though that was more because Manhattan wouldn't. There's much more out there but I couldn't find those I remember off hand. From 2000 on, Frank, Mark, and I animated several Hershey's Kiss spots that started http://www.GuruStudio.com/ in Toronto. (I find it ironic that I was pushing big eyes back then when no one else was, BEFORE Bratz came along. for example ) Most of these sketches are from back then too: off of my 2000-2010 partly archived WickedSunshine.com. Last time I checked I was the only Jason Carswell on IMDb but there's only a dozen credits there for things that have credits.

One of the worst projects I ever worked on, and my only television show, was A Little Curious, a cringey craptastic childrens series produced in a rush to fill space on a new (1998) HBO children channel. Funny thing, a dozen years later my nephew watched regularly with my mom. The animation team was good but the management and direction not. Above all I absolutely despised the "nephew art" character design. After years of not having it, I finally found a piece on first glance that I'd been wanting to get for my demo reel back then because it was not too bad (after it left my hands). At 4min10 seconds you can watch my Too Light! Too Dark! animation I did. I was living in NYC but flew back to Toronto in 1998 when I moved from Click3x to Curious ?ictures and needed a new visa. I was declined so I was stuck in Toronto for a month. Curious arrange for me to have a work station at Alias, the 3D software company we used, where I developed my own faux-bezier tool for Mr. String. I heard they put that bit in for some awards. I never saw it rendered before. It looks like shit. I'm afraid to see what my other animation on the show looks like, but there's no way I'm going to watch a whole season of that crap to find my scenes. (Turns out the end credits are accurate per the episode and easy to check. I don't remember how many scenes I did, but I'm sure they're all rushed and craptastic.) Not only that, it's clearly obvious someone pulled back and raised the camera, thus widening the frame, changing the angle, and mucking up my Mr. String shapes, but worse they had to move the ceiling up (and tilt the walls) - and they didn't move the top constraint of the string so he no longer swings properly as there's a stiff part at the top, crooked at that! I'd consider cropping it if it wasn't rendered so shitty. On the up side it was fun to animate to a great voice performance that is a good example of extreme vocal acting that I might want for my /s/Trutherism101 project.

There's more crap out there too but this has become tedious. If I don't toot my own horn no one else will. Long humblebrag over.