For Halloween, the extra cool crew at Cartoon Network invited us to make a glob of promos for eight of their shows. Mixing series characters with Halloween themes, the girls and guys at Cartoon Network afforded us a ton of creative freedom in the short production timeline while still keeping things locked to a cyan, magenta, and yellow color palette. In about 30 days, we designed and animated 16 bumps in total, a :10 and a :05 for each show, including a Halloween themed menu template which would be editable and customizable for other network use.
Each piece varies in spook level and fright factor with play on Halloween themes to tie to character attributes and show ideas or storyline.
Bumps were made for Adventure Time, Regular Show, Uncle Grandpa, The Looney Tunes Show, MAD, Annoying Orange, Ben 10 Omniverse, and The Amazing World of Gumball plus the menus.
*Extra super secret Impactist production factoid: Uncle Grandpa premiered as a series during this time, so we communicated only using the phrase “Good Morning” during these weeks, regardless of time of day and for anything that need be said. Good Morning. Good Morning. Good Morning. He’s our Uncle, and our Grandpa.
For the winter holiday season, we continued making promos for the same Cartoon Network shows, but added in the new series Steven Universe. He turns his fingers into cats, so you know we’re instant fans. Meow.
The winter promos follow a tighter visual structure, with a rolling and accumulating snowball initiating movement through each piece. Though, characters and story quickly divert the ball in ways specific to each series to make each piece unique and discoverable in repeat viewings.
Again, we produced two spots for each show, a :10 and a :05, and also a menu template customizable to introduce upcoming shows in the day’s schedule and other use.
Individual bumps were made for Adventure Time, Regular Show, Uncle Grandpa, The Looney Tunes Show, MAD, Annoying Orange, Ben 10 Omniverse, The Amazing World of Gumball, and Steven Universe plus the menus.
Now, nobody sane watches TV with the sound on mute. At least, nobody we’d want to hang with. That’s cray. So, we also created a electro-peppermint tinged music track called “Wintertone” to pair with the winter promos. Nine edits of varied length and composition were delivered to afford Cartoon Network maximum flexibility and use even beyond these specific animated bumps. We think this track is shaking it just right for the holidays. Because shaking it’s all we know.
Now, we can’t lie. We love a challenge and this one was certainly up there: 36 total pieces with 9 tracks of audio in the production timeline we worked in was a test at times. But, we couldn’t be happier to work with the awesome gang at Cartoon Network.
