AN INTERVIEW WITH BRAD GRAEBER (FROM POWERHOUSE ANIMATION)
BY CHRIS GRAVES
CHRIS GRAVES: How and why was Powerhouse Animation formed and where did it’s relationship with View Askew begin?
BRAD GRAEBER: Frank Gabriel , Bruce Tinnin and I all worked for a “dot com” in Austin , TX. The company was going to make an online children’s entertainment site, with games and short cartoons. They hired former feature film and television animators and formed a unit to make the cartoons. Like all the other “dot coms,” it started going belly up at the end of 2000. The three of us decided, instead of going back to what we were doing before, we would try our hand at starting a little service studio.
We animated a cartoon that I wrote called Heroes. Things were a little slow at the office, so Frank, Bruce, and some of the other guys helped finish the animation. The cartoon was for a contest Wizard magazine was having, and Kevin was a judge. When we finished the short, Frank sent it to a friend. His friend sent it to a friend, who from what I understand sent it Joe Quesada at Marvel…who sent it to Kevin.
It spread quickly. When I came into work the day after we finished the short, my inbox was full and we were several hundred MBs over our bandwidth quota. The company was still young and struggling, and I was scared. I think the fines were adding up to several hundred dollars at that point. I was in the process of ripping down our website, trying to figure out what happened, when I got an e-mail from Kevin. I didn’t believe it was him, I figured it was a friend pulling my leg. But I ended up talking to Kevin on the phone later that day.
I only got 2nd in the contest, but since the point of the cartoon was to get Kevin’s attention; it was pretty successful. I talked to him before I had even submitted the piece to Wizard, if I remember correctly.
CG: What is your background in the world of animation?
BG: When I was in the 3rd grade, I was assigned the standard “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wrote that I wanted to be an animator. I figured once I said it, I had to stick with it; or look like a quitter. I went to graduate school at Texas A&M, in the Visualization Sciences program, which is just fancy for computer graphics programming and 3d animation. While I was stumbling through the program, trying to figure out how do get to do traditional animation, and have it count for credit…I came across FutureSplash (which would become Flash) and have been working with it ever since.
At Powerhouse, we have a wide variety of backgrounds. Bruce worked at Fox Animation on films like Anastasia and Titan AE. Frank has worked as an animator on tons of projects from characters like Bugs Bunny to a variety of commercial, film, and TV properties.
CG: Can you explain the genesis of the Heroes short film with Captain America cast as Dante Hicks and DareDevil cast as Randal Graves?
BG: I was trying to come up with ideas for the Wizard contest. A friend, Brandon Bollom, suggested doing Clerks with comic characters; which made a lot of sense, since it was a Wizard contest and Kevin was a judge. I think I wrote a whole bunch of scenarios and gags with various characters, and then put it together in a script. The characters were who they were, just for the sake of gags. For instance, I used Daredevil so I could reference the Ben Affleck movie that was filming at the time. I was and am a huge fan of the Clerks Animated Series, so I guess that was where most of it came from. We animated it in a very short amount of time and did all the voices. I voiced Captain America , and Frank was Hitler, Daredevil, the Silver Surfer, and a few others. It is kind of hard for me to watch now; things are much easier to create in Flash these days. But I got to put “Run’s House” in a cartoon, so that is cool…
CG: Does Powerhouse prefer working in traditional 2-D animation or the more state of the art 3-D computer stuff? Which do you prefer?
BG: We do traditional animation, using Flash most of the time. We also create and program Flash based games and interactive pieces. We don’t really do 3d animation. We have found a nice little niche, holding onto the concepts and principles of traditional animation and applying that to Flash based work. We still use traditional methods to do the animation, but these days we may be animating straight into the computer using a Wacom Cintiq. To be honest, I consider what we do to be as state of the art as 3-d computer stuff…just in a different way.
CG: Were there any special instructions you got from Kevin in terms of The Lost Scene short film that was included on the Clerks X special tenth anniversary DVD?
BG: If I remember correctly, we used the comic version of the story that Phil Hester and Ande Parks illustrated as a jumping off point, and created storyboards based on that. We sent the boards to Kevin and he gave us notes. He did have several additional suggestions like having Julie Dwyer float “ass-first” to the surface of the pool in the flashback. Kevin is very specific in his direction, and has a good eye for cartoons.
We only had about a month, a limited budget, and a small crew to create the8 minute piece. Because of this, we wanted to send things to Kevin regularly, so that we could get notes on the fly, and keep the production humming. We had a really good time working on the piece. If you look, you can see all of us in the backgrounds.
CG: What are some of the other projects Powerhouse has been involved with aside from View Askew?
BG: Before traditional feature animation production ceased to exist, we did some service work on projects like Adam Sandler’s 8 Crazy Nights. We also worked on shows like Disney’s The Proud Family, when some overseas studios did sub-par work (which happens all the time). These days we create Flash pieces for ad agencies, television commercials, viral marketing pieces for PR firms, interactive content for educational companies and a lot more. For instance, we have done pieces for Microsoft, Ruffles, Mountain Dew and a country music video called Mr. Mom. We also do character designs, and work on pilots from time to time.
CG: Is it true that Powerhouse created some View Askew video games for Kevin? And if so, what were the titles and what were the plots of the games?
BG: The arcade games were the first thing we did with View Askew. One of the programmers who worked for us at the time and I had converted an old Galaga cabinet into a Flash powered game kiosk that played old games and new Flash games. We did a cartoon about it, and sent it to Kevin. He hired us to make two of the cabinets, one for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez as a wrap present for Jersey Girl and another one that was for the Secret Stash. The Stash arcade machine had two custom games: one based on Dogma and the other based on the Clerks Animated series. In both you could play as Jay or Silent Bob, if I remember correctly. The games were both side-scrollers, similar to games like Double Dragon. You fought your way through thugs to get to a boss. In the Dogma game the bosses were the Golgothan and Azrael. In the Clerks game it was Mr. Plug and Leonardo Leonardo. The “Benlo” box had 1 custom game. You played as Jennifer Lopez, and fought ninjas to save Ben Affleck who had been mysteriously kidnapped. The mastermind behind the plot turned out to be Kevin. The main selling point of the games were the cinematics, (short animated bits you watched after you completed a level). We sent some rough outlines to Kevin, who wrote them out and added dialogue. In the “Jen Saves Ben” game you fought a big ninja, Matt Damon (who was like his character in a Bourne Identity. For some reason one of our employees, Steve Parker, was convinced was a robot so we animated him as one), and finally you fought Kevin to save Ben.
We drove both of the Arcade machines to New York from Austin , in a U-Haul hooked up to my Jeep Cherokee. It was a crazy road trip, because we were literally still coding the games on the way up, and had very little sleep for several days before hand. We drove into Manhattan on the last night of Jersey Girl shooting and presented the game when they wrapped a kissing scene that took forever to shoot because of the paparazzi.
CG: Besides the Clerks: Sell Out animated movie test footage, did the company do anymore work on this long talked about direct to DVD cartoon flick?
BG: Not really. We have talked about it in some form or another since we delivered the arcade machines in 2002. The initial idea was that it was going to be a theatrical piece. The main reason we did the test was to prove that a 35mm film could be done using traditional animation techniques and Flash, because nobody had ever really tried it at the time, as far as we knew. We had already completed an animation of the Flying Car piece Kevin had written, but it was decided that we needed a bit with action in it as well for the test. Jason Mewes was not available for dialogue, and we were in a time crunch, so I suggested just ripping audio from Empire Strikes back. We made a 35mm print of the test and showed it at a theater on the lot in LA that View Askew was using at the time.
CG: What is Powerhouse Animation currently working on?
BG: We just finished a bunch of cinematics for the new Penny Arcade video game. We are also working on a few commercials and educational projects. As strange as it sounds, we are also working on some political animation for elections in Australia …. Some of us also have personal projects. From time to time, I work on a web-series called Captain Capitalism, Frank has a character called Webb Jackson, and Bruce does fine art painting.
CG: And finally, is the company working on the mysterious new untitled View Askew direct to DVD animated movie?
BG: I hope so. We owe Kevin and View Askew a lot. Things were tough for new small companies after 9/11. Especially a company that specialized in producing a product, that at the time, folks were saying was killed by 3d animation. Kevin’s projects kept our name out there, and helped keep us afloat a couple of times. Kevin is probably the nicest person I have met in the entertainment industry. He is as genuine as they come. We would love to work with him again.
