On a completely different note, here’s a mural that my sister-in-law commissioned me to paint on the nursery wall before my niece was born. That was over a year ago though it feels like just yesterday. They grow up so fast, don’t they…
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Wow. This weekend I truly learned just how powerful YouTube has become. Sometime before the sun came up on Saturday, my new cartoon “Hebrew Crunk” was posted at the top of the “Recently Featured” section on the YouTube homepage. By the time I checked my email at 10:00 am that morning, 71,000 people had viewed it and there was 430 comments. Within a couple hours…on a Saturday morning. Incredible.
As the week progressed and my cartoon worked it’s way down from the top of the front column, the views continued to mount up but less so each day. 403,344 so far on day 5. Let no one dismiss YouTube for a while. It’s where the action is these days.
One of the coolest things for me about working on the “Six Monsters” cartoon for Nickelodeon is that John DiMaggio is doing the voice for Roy. For those of you who don’t know, John DiMaggio is also the voice of Bender the robot from Futurama!
…and the penguin from “Madagascar”
…and General Grievous in “Star Wars: Clone Wars”
…and the dog from Pen Ward’s “Adventure Time”
…and about 700 other deep voiced cartoon characters from the last decade.
So listening to this guy read dialogue that I wrote for him is incredibly exciting. And now I get to animate his character! How cool is this?
Though it wasn’t made for a Hebrew holiday specifically, today’s cartoon is about something equally important to the Jewish people: food.
I made this cartoon in the summer of 2005 for a Long Island-based Kosher food distributor. First, I got my extremely talented musician friend Micah Frank to compose all the music, then I wrote some lyrics and the two of us sang it.
The two cartoon narrators are modeled to look like my grandfathers in their younger days. Both were skilled masters in the Jewish art of “noshing” (Yiddish for snacking). They would be jealous to know that one of the perks from doing this cartoon was a free pass to the Kosher food convention at the Jacob Javits Center. I got to spend a whole day running around sampling delicious food of every sort. It was basically like a live-action re-enactment of the cartoon.
Continuing this week’s theme of old freelance Jew-toons, I present to you 2005’s “Shofar Idol”. I honestly don’t know how this one got to be so popular. I had about 48 hours to do it from start to finish before I left the country for a much-anticipated backpacking trip in Europe. I animated it at warp-speed, sent it to the client, and then headed to Newark International Airport. I didn’t give it much thought after that; “Just another hastily-animated client holiday card”
A couple days later I stopped in a Portugese internet cafe to check in back home. I found my inbox crammed with dozens of emails from people who saw “Shofar Idol”; media people, potential clients, regular people who just wanted to say ‘nice work’, and a large number of rabbis. In retrospect, the most signifigant email started out “Hey Dan, I’m Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios.”
I guess the lesson [Read more…]
Since this week begins the Hebrew High Holidays, I thought I’d blog each day about a different Jewish-related cartoon from my
archive.
This above cartoon is my latest. The client is an organization that sends college kids to Israel for free. I decided to skew the subject matter towards that age group. Crunk… that’s what the kids are listening to these days, right?
This is an amazing moment, and I’m not sure how I should feel. When you Google the word “ass” the #1 website is mine. In all of the internet, I am the #1 ass.
A group of friends who I have known since my days at the Syracuse University Illustration program have decided to collectively self-publish a magazine called “Mammal”. We each have until Christmas to put together about 10 pages of whatever artwork we want to share with the world.
My contribution will be an introduction to the history and culture of Kelv. I’ve been concocting this fictional nation in my mind for a couple years now. Kelv is a country located so far East in Eastern Europe that it’s halfway into another dimension.
The above picture depicts Slor, the warrior barbarian who first conqured and united the invading tribes that were trying to claim Kelv for themselves… back when it was just the smoking rubble of an enormous crashed meteor.
Oh yeah, his sword is made from the jawbone of a huge mutated whale-beast he once slayed.
When I explained all this to [Read more…]
