Chad Essley
is an an independent animation director and cartoonist, and the author of the upcoming graphic novel “The Hinterland”. A true story about an unusual friendship with John McAfee, founder of McAfee Antivirus.

CartoonMonkey Studio is a small animation business located in sunny Portland Oregon. We specialize in 2d character animation for education and entertainment. We also develop finished animation from conception to completion for games, interactive, short films and commercials.

Have a project in mind? Take a look at some samples, or an older showreel (flash) for some samples, and get in contact via e-mail for a quick quote.

We also have a large library of past projects to show, that may fit your specific animation needs. Ask about a specific style or feel you’re going for, and we will send along an example for your bid.

Chad Essley

Bio: Chad Essley is an independent animation director located in Portland Oregon with close to 20 years of experience working as a professional animator in the field of commercials, multimedia, and television.

Chad runs a boutique animation business in northwest Portland Oregon called CartoonMonkey Studio. The studio’s emphasis is on original & quirky hand drawn cel as well as simulated cut-out and natural media animation, with a variety of interesting styles.

“I’m a strong advocate for tablet computing, and technology that enables multimedia creation. In January of 2008, my involvement in the Tablet PC community lead to being asked to work directly with Microsoft’s research & development department to design elements & animation concepts for a new tablet device aimed at children k-12.

I started out in video post production, doing Quantel Paintbox graphics & station id’s for news & various post production facilities. Later moving into animation for commercials & short films. I’ve spent some time (which I really enjoyed) in the past teaching stop motion animation for Will Vinton Studios, (of the California Raisins ) as well as 2d animation in Flash for the Pacific NW College of Art , as well as The Northwest Academy in Portland.”

-CV:-

This list is far from complete, but gives a good description of what it is I’ve been doing for the last 20 years..

2012: Working on a graphic novel titled “The Hinterland” about my experience meeting the founder of McAfee Antivirus, John McAfee, as well as an upcoming animated documentary based on the graphic novel.

June – 2011: Update! Two of the animated music videos I made for Committee for Children won the CINE Golden Eagle award for 2011 in children’s entertainment!

(So I suppose I can call myself an award winning animator now.)
I shared the award with none other than Sesame Workshop, who also won the same award. I’m more than a little astonished by that, and humbled.

2010-11:
Completed eight minutes of animation against live action for the CFC Children’s charity.

I’ve recently completed two three minute long animated short films about empathy for the CFC Children’s charity in Seattle, that will be Shown in elementary & middle schools all our the USA this summer.

Here is a list of interesting projects & other things I’ve done in the past:

July 2009: Fray Magazine: Illustration published in Fray Magazine #3 “Sex and Death” for Daniel McDermott’s story “Braces”.

Nov 2009: Slave Labor Publications: Two page comic strip titled “Meat the Future!” in the graphic novel “Lulu & Mitzy” by S. Eddy Bell.

July 2008: EUSR European Union: Three minutes of animation about Bosnia joining the EU, and it’s various implications for the standard Bosnian citizen.

April 2008: US Veteran’s Administration: Contracted by the US Govt. to complete eight minutes (!) of animation for a short series of training videos, used within the Veteran’s Administration itself. Some good animation for a ridiculous cause. The check cleared. To never want to watch this animation again though.

January 2008: Microsoft: Microsoft flew we to Seattle & asked me to do a series of short animations and illustration for some new children’s software, for a new educational device for children.

Renegade Animation: Lead animation supervisor for Leapfrog interactive. Titles include Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Tank Engine, Backyardigans, Spiderman..

TV Paint Inc.: – Current beta tester for this amazing animation software. Interface / usability consultant.

Wacom Inc.: Videos for the Cintiq for Siggraph 2004

Alias Software: Featured artist / video for Alias Sketchbook Pro / Beta tester

ASIFA Northwest: – President from 2003-2004

Pace Video: – Art director / Broadcast Designer

KATU Channel 2: – Broadcast designer

KOIN Channel 6: – Broadcast designer

Northwest Academy: – Animation Instructor / Classes in cartooning & Illustration

Pacific Northwest College of Art: – Animation Instructor

Saturday Academy: – Animation Instructor
Will Vinton Studios: – Created a stop motion animation curriculum and taught / trained animators for “The PJ’s” television series.

Flying Rhino: – Animator – Children’s edutainment cartoons.

StudyDog: – Animator – Children’s edutainment cartoons.

1994: Sesame Street: I’m very proud to have done six educational short films for Children’s Television Workshop, animated on the mighty Amiga 1200 computer..

Flash isn't bad. Web designers are!

Please link this up and spread the word on this on if you can folks.

Flash!

I feel that there’s a great contingent out there that has fallen prey to the “Flash is Bad” Apple propaganda campaign of late. Take for example, what one of my animator friends. An animator! who is an extreme Apple loyalist had to say about a recent project he was hired for. He told me that he was doing graphics for an Iphone application (several short animations) and the authors of this Iphone app wanted to stick to using HTML 5. They hated flash! Just like Steve wanted them to! It was forbidden. The did some HTML 5 tests, but come to find out, as I’ve pointed out earlier, no html5 rich graphics editor exists! (At least not one that can get within a thousand miles of what Flash is capable of.)

So, I was a little shocked when I saw this video by Kevin Tofel of GigaOM, saying how bad Flash on mobile devices was!

As a person who has programmed and used flash since it’s inception, I saw several flaws in the logic behind this video, and I thought I’d point them out.

These points are completely overlooked:

Metacafe is a particularly bad example of flash on the web. They layer flash movie on top of another flash movie, in order to serve up ads, and it isn’t done very well. Certainly not with mobile flash in mind. Not to mention, the browser being set to just run all the flash containers on the page at once.

The real true test, is going to a simple flash site, with lots of complex vector animation going on in it, or video that doesn’t have another .swf advertising layer on top of it. ( say most of the videos on youtube. )

Clear away the extra layering and bad programming cruft, and you’ll see flash working just beautifully on mobile devices.

If you doubt it, take a look using your android phone, at a few old flash demo reels of mine. A simple .flv (Flash video format) – and a pure vector graphics, .swf with a lot of complex drawing going on:

FLV: http://www.cartoonmonkey.com/reel/reel.html
SWF: http://www.cartoonmonkey.com/flashreel1.html

For the animators out there, back when the flash revolution started in the dot com era, cica 2000, you needed a 1000 mhz computer to be able to play flash at 720×480 at 30 frames per second. I now have a 1000 mhz phone in my pocket, and Adobe has really done an amazing job of making the flash player do just that. Sure, it’s not totally perfect, but it’s the raw performance of the devices we have, in combo with bad flash authoring that is to blame for poor flash performance on mobile devices.

I use flash on a daily basis on my Android device, ( and it works great! ) and I wouldn’t use a phone with that part of the web cut out of it by Apple, or anyone else!

-C

1 Comment

dave

September 3, 2010 at 5:48 am // Log in to Reply

I have a love/hate relationship with Flash…well Adobe really. I stopped updating at CS3 but could have stopped much earlier as far as the animation tools were concerned.
That being said the bottom line is that there is nothing else out there that will enable you to do interactive vector animation. The FLV video I suppose has competitors like quicktime but there really is nothing to go up against the good old swf and it is used everywhere on the web. The point of it is probably that Chavtec are trying to corner the market in web video as well as e-books and shiny lifestyle toys.
The Emperor does not have any clothes on!

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Flash isn't bad. Web designers are!

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