Press Release
May 18, 2001

A&S Animation, Inc. releases new animation series in film, video and FLASH simultaneously

Orlando, Fl - Orlando animation house, A&S Animation, Inc. has launched a new short-form animation series, Lessons In Nature, in film, broadcast video and FLASH animation for the web. "Since we are capable of multi-purposing our animation assets, it only makes sense to design our re-use to gain the greatest exposure possible." says Mark Simon, producer and co-director of the series. While other animations have been created for broadcast and have been re-purposed for the web, and vise-versa, Lessons In Nature is the first to be launched in all three arenas simultaneously.

The big screen premiere of Timmy's Lessons In Nature will happen in the summer of 2001 in the touring Spike & Mike Festival of Animation. The festival will tour 50 cities in North America. Timmy will star in 3 shorts in this years festival.

Lessons In Nature is a series of one minute long sight gags where the moron star of the show, Timmy unwittingly demonstrates, with one disaster after another, basic wild life survival rules, such as: Avoid Snakes, Don't Feed the Animals and more. Every episode is filled with laughs for everyone in the family. The show is dialogue-free for international appeal.

The animated shorts are already gaining accolades and a fan-base. They have appeared in the CSUN International Animation Film Festival, the Athen International Film Festival, Cartoons On The Bay in Italy, ASIFA East Animation Festival, the international animators society and won Silver at the WorldFest Houston Festival. Timmy had his world premiere last March at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills.

Simon is co-directing with feature film animator T.J. "T.J. created this wonderfully moronic character that I fell in love with." states Simon. "He started sketching these hysterical sequences and I proposed that we develop them into a series." Simon and T.J. quickly developed the first season with Simon's wife, Jeanne Pappas Simon, a producer from Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network.

A&S Animation, Inc. is producing the broadcast version of the series in-house along with California-based House Of Blaze Productions. They have hired the Moser Bros., 2000 Annie nominees for their FLASH work on Bilkman, to handle converting the art to FLASH. You can see the first episode of the FLASH version online at www.LessonsInNature.tv.

While the same animation for Lessons In Nature is used for both formats, there will be some visual differences between the versions. Simon designed the backgrounds for the broadcast versions but Joel Moser is redesigning them for the web. According to Simon, "Joel has made painting in the FLASH format an art form. He can design backgrounds that look like paintings, but they are actually FLASH format images that keep the overall file size to a minimum. We've gotten to the point working together where I let him play and bring to the project what designs he thinks will work best."

Other differences between the versions are the way the original drawings are used and the quality of the illustration lines. Tom Moser is responsible for re-purposing the original full motion animation drawings into limited motion FLASH drawings, without losing the quality of the animation. Since FLASH files need to be kept small, the line quality is also smoother in the web version. T.J. animated the broadcast version in a rough clean-up line to give the animation more life. "Every jiggle in a line adds to the file size." says Moser. "I had to clean-up the original art with smoother lines to keep the file as small as possible and allow it to run as quickly as full-motion animation." Whereas T.J. animated small motions in the holds, Moser kept that to a minimum and separated out the body parts that were moving.

Timmy's Lessons In Nature is in production on 26 one minute episodes. A&S Animation, Inc. is developing a half-hour version of the series, called The Troop. Timmy stars in The Troop which mixes a moronic troop of Boy Rangers trying to survive an unforgiving Mother Nature, sabotage by a local, backwoods, bad-boy threesome, and humiliation by the beyond-perfect Girl Rangers.

A&S Animation, Inc. is a full service animation studio specializing in cell animation and development of television series, specials, commercials and training videos.

For more information, contact Mark Simon at A&S Animation, Inc., 407-370-2673 or at mark@storyboards-east.com. Sara Henson at Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation may be contacted at 858-459-8707.

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