ABC's Bump in the Night is the first stop-motion animated television series since Gumby. But perpetual adolescents are tuning in to check out the blink-and-you-miss-'em psychotic Bumpy Vision cartoons that appear within the kids show. These are co-created by Stephen Holman, who used to animate cartoon shorts for the now vacant Pee Wee's Playhouse. To supply the show with "little pieces that stand out from the rest," Holman says, "I pick out bits in the script where Mr. Bumpy (the series's warty star) goes off on tangents and surrealist monologues."
Bits indeed. Although most of Bump in the Night's animation is done with traditional stop-motion, producers chose to do some segments, such as the hallucinatory Bumpy Vision shorts, digitally. Enter John Duggan, the spring-loaded mind behind the frenetic look of Sega's Sonic Spinball. Drawing from a digital library chock-full of grabbed frames depicting the 3-D Mr. Bumpy in various poses, Duggan cuts, pastes, edits, and animates the green meanie. Also squeezed in are backgrounds, fly-by sprites, and various other digitized distractions. Says Holman: "We wanted really bright popping colors that stand out against the show, which is dark and moody and set in the night in this boy's bedroom."
Bump in the Night plays Saturday mornings on ABC.
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