Tag Archives: work

Kids Like Us

Karl worked with illustrator and animator Arthur Jones and Humanface co-founder Jon Bryski on Arthur’s brainchild pitch for Fox’s Inkubation program. A joint venture between 20th Century Fox Television and Fox Broadcasting company, Fox Inkubation serves as a lab environment in the search for television’s next breakthrough animated hit.

The development process was highly collaborative, and Arthur encouraged participation across creative disciplines, with all team members contributing to multiple areas of development. With a skeleton crew and a compact timeline of two months, we designed, storyboarded, animated, and edited three animated shorts for the proposal.

CLIENT: Fox Inkubation

CREDITS:
Created + Written: Arthur Jones
Produced + Directed: Karl Ackermann, Jon Brzyski and Arthur Jones
Art + Animation: Karl Ackermann, Jon Brzyski and Arthur Jones
Animation + Production Assistant: KJ Martinet
Music + Sound Design: Mark Greenberg
Story Editor: David Wilcox
Audio Engineer: Woody Sullender
Animation Assistant: Zejian Shen
Additional Assistance: Seth Lind, Ben Olson

Winterfresh Gum Commercials

Under the creative direction of BBDO Chicago, we developed an eye-catching commercial campaign for Wrigley’s Winterfresh gum brand. We directed and produced four on-air and three online spots with an irreverent anything-goes style to champion the power of fresh breath: CoolBreathPower.

CLIENT: BBDO Chicago for Wrigley

CREDITS:
Director, Illustrator, Animator: Karl Ackermann
Additional animation: Jon Bryzski, Takeshi Murata, Eun-Ha Paek, Arthur Jones
Producer, Creative Direction, Copy: BBDO Chicago

iPhone App for John Baldessari’s In Still Life

Partnering with Dan Nadel and Vectorpark, we made an iPhone app and website to accompany John Baldessari’s retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA.

CLIENT: ForYourArt and Ovation

CREDITS:
Creative direction: Dan Nadel
iPhone interactivity/programmer: Patrick Smith/Vectorpark
Producer: Karl Ackermann
Designer: Eun-Ha Paek
Web programmer: Ranjit Bhatnagar
Production: Tomomi Sohn
Painting: Banquet Still Life(1667) by Abraham van Beyeren (Holland, 1620-1690)

Sports Illustrated Kids D.E.N.

As part of a massive redesign effort, SIKids.com came to us to create an immersive interactive experience that would encourage a boost in user registrations, promote sticky play and return visits, and drive traffic to the far corners of their site.

Working in partnership with Humanface, we created the Mascot D.E.N. (Dynamic Entertainment Nest) – a highly customizable avatar and interactive playroom, equipped with interactive animation, video, and messaging. We developed a number of interactive branded integrations as a unique add-on to the traditional SIKids.com media buy. We drove participation both in the application and across the site by way of an economy that rewards users for reading articles and playing games on SIKids.com. The economy awards points that can be spent in the application’s shop to collect items for the user’s playroom.

CLIENT: Sports Illustrated Kids/Turner Broadcasting

CREDITS:
Creative: Karl Ackermann, Jon Brzyski
Art, and Animation: Karl Ackermann, Jon Brzyski, Patrick Smith, Luke Boggia, Hal Lee
Flash Progamming: Ranjit Bhatnagar, Patrick Smith, Guy Hundere, Howard Wakefield, Karl Ackermann
Sound Design: Heather Perkins
Voiceover: Jon Brzyski
Backend Programming: WorkinMan, Turner Broadcasting

Bubblicious Gum Website

For Cadbury’s Bubblicious gum brand website, we drew on references from MAD magazine to the Saturday morning commercials of yore to develop this humorous and playful website designed with tweens in mind. In addition to the website, we created and developed 4 gum themed games.

CLIENT: JWTwo NY

CREDITS:
Karl Ackermann: Creative Direction, Copy
Eun-Ha Paek: Art Direction, Design, Illustration, Animation
Jon Brzyski: Design, Copy, Illustration
Takeshi Murata: Illustration, Animation
Sound: Jona Bechtolt, E*rock
Additional Animation, Illustration: Julian Gatto, Arthur Jones, Will Bredbeck
Programming: Patrick Smith, Howard Wakefield, Gabriel Jensen, Louis Santos, Smerc, Chris Robinson, Brad Pauly

P.S. from Aeropostale Website Teaser

Aeropostale looked to us to create a fun animated web teaser for their new tween clothing brand, p.s. from aeropostale. Our solution was to create word balloon characters with constantly changing emoticon faces that interact with the logo in a playful way. Brand graphics are revealed within the logo, giving a sneak peek at the fresh style of the new brand.

Client: Aeropostale

Director, Character Designer, Animator: Eun-Ha Paek
Creative Direction, Producer: Karl Ackermann
Sound Designer: Eric Mast
Backend Programming: Brad Pauly

Strindberg and Helium Animated Series

Our online animated series about August Strindberg and his joyful sidekick, Helium has appeared in the Sundance Online Film Festival 2003, Comedy Central’s “Jumpcuts”, and made it as top 25 finalist in the YouTube Play Guggenheim Biennial of Creative Video.

Director, Animator, Illustrator: Eun-Ha Paek
Writer: Erin Bradley
Voiceovers: Erin Bradley, James Bewley

Episode 5: Produced by Milky Elephant and Erin Bradley+ James Bewley
Sound design by Heather Perkins/Waterdog Studio
Sound engineering by Paul Hollman and Suzanne Goldish

Episodes 1-4: Produced by Milky Elephant and Killing my Lobster
Sound effects and engineering by Craig Helmholz

Press:
NYTimes.com/ArtBeats. Sep 20, 2010
Interview on Screensavers, G4 Tech TV. Feb, 2005
New York Times “Reverberations”, May 28, 2004
Entertainment Weekly “The Must List”, Oct 10, 2003
USA Today Online, Oct 22, 2003

Vigilance tous Azimuts Music Video

smallpower.org came to us to create an educational music video that was part of a larger campaign to inform people about HIV/AIDS in the Congo. It was a fun challenge making a didactic but entertaining music video on a limited budget with a tight deadline.

It was distributed on VCD to people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and broadcast on Congolese television.

CLIENT: smallpower

CREDITS:
Director, Artist, Animator: Eun-Ha Paek
Musician: Alain Mpela
Producer: smallpower

Sharpteeth Book Trailer

Book trailer for the novel, Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow.

CREDITS:
Director, Artist, Animator: Eun-Ha Paek
Musician & composer of “Trilogie Femme: Vierges, une vrai maman, face au miroir”: Sébastien Tellier
Music courtesy of Blonde Music/Record Makers, thanks to Toby Barlow and Creative License

Screenings:
12th Wiesbaden International Weekend of Animation 2010 – Wiesbaden, Germany
Fukuoka Film Festival 2010 – Fukuoka, Japan
S̩quence Court-Metrage Film Festival 2010 РToulouse, France
Tricky Film Festival 2009 – Vienna, Austria
International Film Festival Breda 2009 – Netherlands
Woodstock Film Festival 2009 – Woodstock, NY
3DNA@Comicon 2009 – Naples, Italy
First Look 2010 Emerging Artist Series, Visual Arts Center of NJ – Summit, NJ

Publications:
3×3 Illustration Annual No. 6
American Illustration 28

Queen of the May Music Video

Music Video for Veda Hille’s Queen of the May from Return of the Kildeer.

CLIENT: Ape House Records

CREDITS:
Director, Artist, Animator: Eun-Ha Paek
Musician: Veda Hille

Screenings:
Krok International Film Festival 2007 – Ukraine
Red Bank Film Festival 2007 – Red Bank, NJ
AnimaBasauri 2007- Karratu 3, Bilbao, Spain
Red Shift Film Festival 2006 – New York, NY
SXSW Film Festival 2006 – Austin, Texas

Sports Illustrated Kids Online Games

To celebrate the Summer Olympics, we developed the Games of the Keyboard Olympiad for SIKids.com.

5 games in 1, Doodle Games draw inspiration from fast-button classics like Track and Field and demands both keen finger-eye coordination and flat out tapping speed.

Our hero is incepted into a hand-drawn world of his own creation and must compete in dream-tweaked versions of Olympic events in a quest for gold and glory.

We integrated the game with SIKids.com’s high score database, so that registered users have the option to post their scores for posterity.

CLIENT: Sports Illustrated Kids/Turner Broadcasting

CREDITS:
Creative, Art, and Animation: Karl Ackermann, Jon Brzyski
Additional Art: Arthur Jones
Additional Animation: Eric Benedict
Progamming: Howard Wakefeld
Sound Design: Heather Perkins