Animation | Todd Shaffer Director

Prodigal Teaser: Enslaved to this Soil

by Todd Shaffer | Jul 5, 2020 | Animation, Directing

Teaser trailer for one of the songs from Prodigal the Musical, which is still in production. This song features Jeff Kready (Les Miserables, A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder, Billy Elliot) and music composed by Romano Musumarra.

Announcing Story Driven Arts

by Todd Shaffer | Jul 5, 2020 | Animation, Commercial, Directing, Painting

I recently launched a new instructional website called Story Driven Arts, which currently features a new podcast and video reviews of animation for animators. The site is aimed at the arts as a storytelling medium, including animation, film, and images.

The Shaffer Creative Podcast has retired

by Todd Shaffer | Jul 5, 2020 | Animation, Commercial, Directing, Painting

After 29 episodes, The Shaffer Creative Podcast has been retired, and in it’s place will be a new podcast called Story Driven Arts.

Shaffer Creative interviewed numerous animators and painters such as Mike Surrey, John Stobart and Michael Greenholt. You can find those podcasts episodes here.

Educ’ alcool Porcupine

by Todd Shaffer | Jul 5, 2020 | Animation, Commercial, Directing

Here’s another one of the Educ ‘alcool ads called Porcupine, animated by Sam Cabanac and Guillaume Blackburn.

Central Park Season 1

by Todd Shaffer | Jul 5, 2020 | Animation

Loren Bouchard’s new animated series Central Park has recently released on Apple. For the last year I had the privilege of supervising the animation for the musical numbers on all 13 episodes which were produced at Tonic DNA. Working with Bento was a fun experience. I was a bit reluctant to get involved with the show at the beginning because the style of animation is not my cup of tea. However, once I started seeing the story and characters unfold, I began to enjoy it. The music is enjoyable, and the show is full of funny situations and gags.

Central Park is a writers show. This became evident while visiting Bento Box’s studios in LA. The writers rooms are central to the production, and my producer, Howard Huxham, and I had the privilege of sitting in on a script reading for Bob’s Burgers.

The one criticism I have with the final product, which was unavoidable, unfortunately, is that we had to animate to the temp music scratch tracks as the final voices were not recorded until late in production. This effectively destroyed most of the animated lip sync. I cringe to watch it.