The second season of Nib animation still has two episodes to go and we wanted to spotlight one of the people who makes it all happen. Keith Stack has worked on both seasons as animation director for Augenblick Studios in New York, putting in countless hours to make our drawings and ideas come to life.
He was interviewed by Sarah Mirk, who also does a ton of things at The Nib including writing and editing for both animation and the website.
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What’s your job title at Augenblick and what does it actually mean?
For the Nib series, I was the animation director. That means I’m in charge of leading a team of animators, doing a bunch of animation myself, and generally just making sure everything got done in time. I also co-directed the voice actors, timed out the comics to the audio, and organized a bunch of files. Some days I’d be recording the voice actors and cutting together the audio, other days I’d just be animating.
What’s unique about the process of how The Nib Animated comes together?
Usually animated cartoon shows will have a writing phase, a character design phase, a storyboard phase, and a layout phase to figure everything out before the animators starts actually animating it. This takes a lot of time! With the Nib, we received a bunch of comics from The Nib crew which combined all of those steps into just one step and made the whole process a lot faster. We’d get the comics as Photoshop files, which we would then vectorize in Illustrator, and then put into Flash, where it would be animated. After animation, it would be prettied-up in AfterEffects and then ready to go!
On our end, the whole process takes about three weeks from the time we receive the comics. The quick turnaround makes it possible to keep the cartoons topical, which is pretty important for a political cartoon show.
What was the most difficult segment to animate?
We had a segment that featured a guy’s face melting off while the camera rotated 360-degrees around his head. That was probably the hardest thing anyone’s ever had to animate ever. Animating a person’s head slowly turning around in a 2-D cartoon is pretty darn tough. In addition to requiring a whole bunch of individual drawings, there’s just a lot of mental juggling that has to go on as you’re remembering what parts of flesh are falling of what parts of the face and when. The face melt was animated by the insanely talented Mavis Huang, with a lot of help from the also insanely talented Mimi Chiu.
What was one of your favorite segments to work on this year?
The President Gun segment made me laugh a lot, plus the way it was drawn was fun to work with. What made me laugh was probably the absurdity of a large, sentient gun running for political office coupled with the raw, emotional reaction of the people — both to his victory and his untimely demise.
Below: the legendary head spin, part of the upcoming season finale.
