Mr. Potato Head Animation

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I’m excited to finally tell you about a project I worked on that has recently gone live: An animated website for Hasbro/Playskool starring Mr. Potato Head!

Last fall I was approached by Minneapolis agency Popular Front to help them update an activity page on Hasbro’s Playskool Kids website. At the time the site featured four host characters—a turtle, a dog, a cat, and a dinosaur—that would guide kids through various games and activities. Hasbro decided they wanted to shine a spotlight on Mr. Potato Head by making him the new host of the site. The plan was to introduce Mr. Potato Head in a “transitional role” as host. He would join the site as a fifth host and then, over time, he would eventually take over as the primary host of the site.

There’s a few activities on the site so Mr. Potato Head had a lot to do and say. Popular Front needed Mr. Potato Head to speak/act 150 different lines of dialogue on a very tight schedule. Popular Front approached me to do the job, and I in turn hired several freelance animators to help me get it all done on time. I’m proud to say we pulled it off.

I had the privilege of supervising an excellent team of very talented animators from the US and Canada: Stanton Cruse (who also built the character pack), Ben Meinhardt, Tod Carter, Michael Foster, Enoc Castaneda, and Ed Olson. They all worked extremely hard and did some fantastic work. Thanks to their help we met the tight deadline and still produced some quality animation.

You can watch Mr. Potato Head in action here: http://kids.hasbro.com/playskoolkids/

Here’s a few screen grabs from the site:

PlaySkool Animation for Hasbro

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Tubby-ScreenShot1

Last summer I was hired by PUNY Entertainment in Minneapolis to assist a team of animators working on a new website for Hasbro’s “PlaySkool” brand. The website was created by Popular Front, also out of Minneapolis. My job was to animate a few dozen clips of Tubby the Turtle, one of four new Hasbro characters. I completed my animation over a year ago but, due to the size and complexity of the project, the site has just recently gone live. I’m excited to finally be able to show my work!

I did about two-thirds of the Tubby animation, the rest was done by other animators at PUNY. To see my work you can go to the site and watch for the red storybook to appear in the lower right-hand corner. Click on it and then choose the Turtle character.

The site is designed to be highly interactive so that each character will say and do something different each time you navigate the site. There were something like 150 total clips that had to be animated for each of the four characters.

I’ve also created a montage of a few of the clips I did. Unfortunately I’m having problems exporting them to a format that I can post on this blog or even on YouTube, but you can view the clip on the animation page of my website. It’s the very first clip at the top of the list.