New York - FlickerLab has animated the first of eight new Tek Jansen adventures that will be rolled into “The Colbert Report” over the course of the season. Each episode of “Stephen Colbert Presents Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7: The New Tek Jansen Adventures” is each approximately three minutes in length.
The first of the new adventures, “Beginning’s: First Dawn,” aired on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, Wednesday, September 12.
This first episode, "Beginning's: First Dawn," brought to life by FlickerLab, begins at a time before the hero was a hero, when Tek was just a pimply faced, physically awkward kid who had never had even a single girlfriend. Back to the day when the personification of evil, Thurmond Chang, has had the last Alpha Squad Agent killed and, before he dies, he hands his nano fiche to young Tek, placing the fate of the universe in his inexperienced hands.
“Tek Jansen has previously appeared on ‘The Colbert Report,’ in an online novel, and in comics so we stepped into a world and a character with a deep history and fan base that could only be described as rabid. This gave us a fantastic foundation to work with. From there, we designed a planetary parliament full of new characters, and enjoyed the thrill of animating the origins of the galaxy's most virile hero,” explains Harold Moss, founder/creative director, of FlickerLab, a development, design and animation house. “The fun of these cartoons is how serious they are -- everything is deadpan and beyond, harkening back to the adventure cartoons we all watched as kids. The whole team had a blast hitting all the over-the-top notes in those cartoons that kept all of us nailed to the floor in front of the tube, sugar cereal spilling out of our stuffed mouths, every Saturday morning as we were growing up,” continues Moss.
The FlickerLab team included Creative Director Harold Moss; Executive Producer Tammy Walters; Animation Director Phil Lockerby; Lead Designer Max Porter; Character Designers Nick Bertonazzi and Simon Ampel; Background Designers Max Porter, Bryan Cox and Simon Ampel; Storyboards Phil Lockerby; Animatic Editor Anthony Orkin; Supervising Producer Melissa Johnson; Producer Franklin Zitter; 2D Animators Phil Lockerby, Simon Ampel, Adam Sacks and Alissa Harris; Animation Interns Theresa Finelli, Loo Wang, Micah Cohen and Pedro Davies; and Production Assistant Paul Imperio; Sound Designer and Mixer Thomas Lino, and Assistant Sound Designer Johanna Bystrom.
FlickerLab used Adobe Creative Suite CS3; Apple Final Cut Studio 2; Panic Transmit software; PowerMac G5 computers; iMac Intel computers; Dell Ultrasharp 24-inch widescreen displays; Apple displays; Aja’s Kona 2; Sony Digibeta Deck; Sony Broadcast Monitor; Wacom Intuos 3 tablets, and Wacom Cintiq Tablets in the execution of this project.