Mythbusters’ Adam Savage has a fondness for traditional animation (his father created interstitials for Sesame Street). In a recent video for Tested.com, Savage opens up about his love affair with the art form and teams up with animator Marty Cooper to do a quick animation in Savage’s workshop.
Cooper had a recent viral hit with his short film Aug(De)Mented Reality, part of a series in which he holds a thin sheet of overhead projector acetate over real world scenes while his figures interact with the landscape, all shot on his iPhone. He reproduces this method in Savage’s workshop, even getting the Mythbusters co-host to interact with his cartoon “zeebler,” which Cooper describes as “a mix between an octopus, and a cat, and a dog.”
Overwhelming visual effects prowess is now par for the course in an age of massive CGI budgets, but there’s still a delicate, ineffable quality to hand-drawn animation that tickles the neurons in a way pixels don’t (even if many of the same principles apply). Check out more of Cooper’s work on his Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube accounts.