Our Cartoon President

Greetings My Fellow Americans! Over the last year or so I've had the privilege to work as one of the Drawn Animators on Our Cartoon President on Showtime, a spinoff show from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. As a long time viewer of Mr. Colbert's work and a dirty Liberal who's been glued to the news since the 2016 election, this job was a dream come true! It was an amazing experience working with all the amazing artists at Late Night Cartoons Inc, the studio CBS built pretty much from the ground up specifically for this show. From the character designers, to background art, on up to editing and compositing, everyone on this show was working on the top of their game. The resulting show looks WAY better than any silly little political humor cartoon has any right being.

Our Cartoon President is one of the first television shows to make thorough use of Adobe Character Animator rigs for speedy production. This means that each character gets set up with a rig that can be puppeted by a member of the "performance" team, with multiple "drawn" actions or gestures that are frame-by-frame animations that can be triggered. Once enough basic gestures have been worked into the digital "puppet" they can be re-used as many times as you like, to create new animated scenes quickly. That's how the show manages to stay so current!


As one of the first "drawn" animators to join the team, I got to create many of Cartoon Trump's base gestures, as well as several more complicated full-body animations, such as the walk animation in the clip above. (I ended up doing walk cycles for several characters, including Trump, Jared, and Steven Miller.) Every scene gets touched by multiple people over the course of production, so sometimes all you can do is point to a shot and say, "Look, I made that arm!"

After a full 17 episodes, we now have a Mid-Term Election Special episode that just came out. We worked extra hard on it, including a fully animated musical dance sequence featuring Donald Trump Jr! You can catch the whole series now on Showtime. Check it out!