In this 4:16 video, Bryan cleverly pokes jabs at topical news like the Occupy movement, throws in guns, mixes in Santa as a Zombie, then ends it all in a hilarious courtroom scene:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a reminder…

• Bryan is a student at Big Picture High School in Burien.
• This is his third year Interning for the blog.
• He is an Artist who is studying animation, and creates his videos using Flash.
• He spent between 7-10 days conceiving, drawing, voicing and animating this video.
• We think that he’s also developing an excellent sense of comedic timing.
• Oh, and did we mention that he’s just 16-years old?

B-Town Blog Intern Bryan Charles, of Big Picture High School

BTB Intern Bryan Charles, of Big Picture High School, has been very busy lately, working ‘nose-down,’ grinding out original stories and jokes through the tough process known as animation, to create some new ’3 Frog. Bros.’ cartoons and comics.

First, here’s his intro to his latest episode:

“Welcome everybody to the next amazing adventure in the Frog Bros’ Series!

Our hero Green discovers a problem with his talking nintendo Wii and has it reset, only to discover that the date he reset it to is the same date as when it was evil:”

Click here to view the embedded video.

“So the frog bros must battle their most fearsome enemy all over again and this time it’ll be even harder!”

Here’s Bryan’s most recent ’3 Frog Bros.’ comic saga (also available here) – click images to see larger versions:

To see more of Bryan’s work, click here.

We’re big fans of Bryan, mostly because we have seen his artistic and comedic talents grow over the last school year, maturing from a ‘once-in-a-while, oh that’s kinda funny’ response to a more ‘man, your comedic pacing has really improved – might you be the next Matt Groening?!’ one.

Here’s his latest animation, which we consider by far his best work. It features a new character named Liam R. Frogensten, a hyperactive Doppelganger who happens to be from England, with a very silly accent voiced by Bryan, in the setup to a classic ‘switcheroo’ plotline:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If we were to grade Bryan on this new animation, we’d give him a solid A, and here’s why:

• The comedic pacing is very strong.
• The voiceover work is excellent. We especially like Liam’s voice.
• The plot is funny, and some of the gags in this bit are hilarious, like the windshield wiper/clock scene.
• The animation is really good – we could see no mistakes.
• The audio sweetening is good.
• Liam is a very funny character and we want to see more of him! (perhaps a spin-off Bryan…?)

Intern Bryan Charles shows off his self portrait caricature.

Of course, comedy is very subjective, so what’s funny to us may not be funny to you (please remember that if you leave a Comment).

On a personal note, as a former TV comedy writer, we’ve tried writing humor for well over 25 years, and while it can be the most fun job in the world, it’s tough to be consistent and always produce ‘A’ material. We know, because we have failed numerous times.

Combine the difficulty of writing good comedy with the slow, intense time-suck that producing quality animation in Flash can be and perhaps you get an idea of what it takes to create a funny, original cartoon.

This animation is consistent, and qualifies as ‘A’ material to us – way to go Bryan! Now get back to work rendering that 3D epic feature-length film!

If you’re not familiar with Big Picture High School, here’s some info from their website:

At Big Picture, we believe we are doing our best work when each student is an active participant in his or her education, when his or her course of study is personalized by teachers, parents and mentors who know him or her well, and when school-based learning is blended with outside experiences that heighten the student’s interest.

By these means we help students take responsibility for their own learning and prepare for success in college and beyond.

To see more of Bryan’s ’3 Frog Bros.,’ check out his YouTube Channel here.

Like The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween episodes, this one’s sure to go down in history as both scary, humorous and animated.

The plotline is simple, and involves scary neighbors, three frog brothers, a talking Wii, and of course, ZOMBIES!:

“After Green Finds a mysterious book, all heck breaks loose…”

Here’s his animation, which runs 6-minutes and 39-seconds:

To see Bryan’s previous animation, which includes his soon-to-be-famous “3 Frog Bros.” series, click here.

To learn more about the innovative Big Picture High School, click here.

He interviewed himself.

As a Cartoon.

Which we present to you now in all its animated glory:

To see Bryan’s previous animation, which includes his soon-to-be-famous “3 Frog Bros.” series, click here.

To learn more about the innovative Big Picture High School, click here.

by Philip Benais

Jackass 3D: Directed by Jeff Tremaine; Starring Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Ryan Dunn, Jason Acuña, Preston Lacy, Dave England and Ehren McGhehey.

Hi, my name is Philip Benais and this is a film I should hate, but really enjoyed!

Normally it would seem strange for someone who champions the idea that Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky were the two greatest directors who ever lived to recommend something like Jackass 3D, but I’m a strong believer in having ‘guilty pleasures’. I think we can only take this film for what it is; an hour and half send off to everything trashy, juvenile and hilarious about the premise of morons doing crazy masochistic things to get laughs. It’s not art, but by god is it entertaining.

For the record however, this film is disgusting; not in that cute ‘Ew look at that’ sort of way, I mean in a way that you may actually want to retch, as many of the people involved in the movie do. To give you a clue, there are quite a few stunts involving farts, feces, male genitalia and one particularly disgusting stunt involving sweat. Then again, if you have any inkling of how gross the previous Jackass films were, I’m sure that this will come as no surprise. What WILL surprise you is the sense of grandness these daredevil antics have taken on since the last time we saw these guys. Everything is overblown and for this type of shock jock humor, size matters.

In the vein of the other Jackass films and the series, there is no plot so to speak, besides the most primal connection that male friends can make; being idiots together. Through this hour and a half, you’ll see Knoxville and crew debase themselves and other people, with each stunt getting worse and worse reaching towards a climax in a port-a-potty. Many times I winced and cringed, but ultimately it kept me coming back. Even if this film was difficult to watch at times, there’s an indescribable pleasure in watching all of these revolting things in a room full of people that are just as shocked and entertained.

The best parts of the film surprisingly were the 3D effects; ultimately when you have an expensive gimmick like 3D, it’s nice to see it in a series like Jackass. It harkens back to the 1980’s 3D films, and ultimately when the craze dies down again, we’ll all look on films like Jackass 3D and think of them as trashy relics like Jaws 3D. (I will at least.)

Naturally the movie isn’t perfect; apart from being really putrid at times, it peaks much too early so that the final stunts seem underwhelming. It could be that they just ran out of ‘jackass juices’ or that everyone laughs so hard at earlier stunts that you become laughed out. This is also a film that won’t leave a lasting impression down the road, but it’ll immediately become perfect for a pizza and beer party when it’s released on DVD.

In the end, if you want to see one of the best trashy comedies this side of Borat, you can’t go wrong with Jackass 3D. Maybe in a couple of years we’ll see the next step in this sort of low brow humor, but until then, hail to the kings.

Rating: ***/*****

VIDEOS:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Philip Benais is our newest Intern, a 16-year old student at Big Picture High School in SeaTac. He's an aspiring Writer who loves movies, so we let him write reviews for us.

Read more of his work here.]

by Philip Benais

Inception: Directed By Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Ken Watanbe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine and Marion Cotilliard.

I’m not going to mince words here; if you haven’t seen Inception yet, go see if now. I mean it, it’s worth tracking down a theater to see this movie. No ifs, no buts, if you’re a lover of cinema and haven’t seen this masterwork you sorely need to. This is the kind of film that defines a director’s career. Francis Ford Coppola had The Godfather, Quentin Tarantino had Pulp Fiction, and now Christopher Nolan can stand tall and say ‘Yes, I AM the man who made Inception.’ This is the kind of nutty brilliance that you get when you take an idea like Andrei Tarkovsky meets The Matrix or Stanley Kubrick meets James Bond and manage to make it into a blockbuster film. It easily surpassed my already astronomical expectations and if you give it a chance, I’m sure you’ll love it too.

For those of you who don’t know, Christopher Nolan is the man responsible for some of the best films modern cinema has to offer, always bringing us challenging yet completely immersive films that this reviewer could never get enough of; I loved the mystery and excitement of Memento. I reveled in how well Al Pacino and Robin Williams counterbalanced each other in Insomnia. I was relieved at how dark and brooding Batman Begins was, getting rid of the sour taste of Joel Schumacher’s bat nipples and ice puns. I was emotional over The Prestige, and The Dark Knight? Hell, who didn’t enjoy that film? Now, I can safely say that Inception is his magnum opus; no matter the future, this will always be my standard for Christopher Nolan’s future films.

I fear that any explicit details I give would ruin the experience of this movie, so I’ll be sure to word this carefully; Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor, someone who can infiltrate his target’s dreams and take any information he requires. After an extraction gone wrong with his Point Man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) he is asked about the idea of inception from a shady businessman named Saito, (Ken Watanbe) an extremely powerful individual who asks the seemingly simple question ‘if you can steal something from someone’s mind, why can’t you plant something inside?’ After exhausting the point and finally claiming to be able to make Dom’s mysterious legal charges go away, Cobb reconsiders and assembles a new team for one last job before he can finally go home. The new team consists of Cobb, Arthur, Saito, a new dream architect named Ariadne, (Ellen Page) a forger named Eames (Tom Hardy, arguably the most enjoyable actor in the film) and a chemist named Yusuf. (Dileep Rao) The team will have to face seemingly insurmountable odds to plant the idea as well as dealing with Cobb’s ex wife Mal. (Played by the always stunning Marion Cotillard)

Many of you have guessed by now that Inception is not your typical summer fare; some people however were expecting something that you don’t have to think about, and they were severely disappointed.. One of the many brilliant things about Inception is that it treats the audience as if we have a mind; it doesn’t Michael Bay everything by throwing out explosions and busty women at us every five seconds like some summer blockbusters do; this is a film you’ll talk about and discuss, and if you see it with more than one person like I did all three times I watched it, it makes for wonderful post movie conversation. The notion of dreamscape in the film is explored in a more internally consistent way than most other films about questionable realities (save for Dark City, my favorite film of all time.) In Inception, the dialogue is handled in a way that feels natural, but also informative and the multiple levels of reality the characters function on at different times in the film can get a little confusing if you don’t pay attention, but that shouldn’t be a problem for most rational people.

As I’ve mentioned, the writing is a breath of fresh air. It’s not everyday that we see a big budget mainstream film that treats us as more than just amused by things that go boom and the talks in this film are pure Nolan; efficient, calculated but also very human and emotional. It’s a paradox for sure but it’s the mark of a truly great filmmaker. Make no mistake however the action set pieces are some of the best I’ve seen period; some of the extraordinary stunts, especially towards the climax of the film will have your jaw drop as your mind reels from all the poignant things going on. It’s a one of a kind experience that is further enhanced by the performances; Leonardo DiCaprio is wonderful, in a very vulnerable and saddened way and any scene with him and Marion Cotillard will make you run the gamut of emotions. Jospeh Gordon-Levitt is pitch perfect as the rigid Arthur, providing some of the films better moments with his deadpan humor. Nolan regulars Watanbe and Caine astound as Saito and Miles, Cobb’s father-in-law respectively, even if Caine has more of a bit part this time around. The scene stealer however, is Tom Hardy as Eames a wise cracking, cynical man after my own heart. Every time Hardy was onscreen I experienced everything from laughter to awe and with the rumors of Nolan adapting a Bond film, I wouldn’t mind seeing Hardy as the titular secret agent to save us from Daniel Craig…alas, I digress.

Christoper Nolan was quoted as saying that Inception harkens back to ‘that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real,’ and every word of that quote is true. I don’t hand out five stars to films very often, especially Science Fiction films since as I mentioned my favorite film is a Sci Fi movie. Inception though, is an obvious exception; it stands tall with classics of the genre like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is it as good as Dark City in my mind? I won’t lie, it’s the closest a film has come since I saw Dark City all those years ago. I doubt I’ll find a film for the rest of year that’ll match up to this one. Am I a bit biased? Yeah, I admit it but with a film like this how could you not be?

Rating: *****/*****

VIDEOS:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Philip Benais is our newest Intern, a 16-year old student at Big Picture High School in SeaTac.

Read more of his work here.]

We’d like to welcome our newest Intern to The B-Town Blog, Philip Benais, a 16-year old student at Big Picture High School in SeaTac.

Philip will be working as a Writer, Reporter, Reviewer and more, focusing mostly on words.

Rather than tell you about the newest member of our team, we thought it’d be more interesting to let him introduce himself in his own words:

Who Is Philip Benais?

No doubt many of you are asking yourself that exact question, and on my more existential days I find myself asking it too.

To put it simply, I’m a 16-year old like no other; where most kids are interested in the latest musical trend or fashion statement, I keep it simple with my Bruce Campbell inspired sense of dress, my biting sense of humor and my love for all things writing. Ever since I could hold a pen, I’ve had a dream to be a writer. Naturally with age things developed and I started to take more interest in reporting and reviewing, things that I’ve always loved but felt too timid to try for myself.

Now, thanks to Big Picture High School, the wonderful Mr. Scott Schaefer and a few extra years on my belt I’m here doing what I’ve wanted to: reporting the things that need to be reported on.

In the months to come you’ll see a lot from me, some may be better than others, but one thing I can guarantee is that I’ll always be working with a smile and I’ll be telling you all only the truth; let’s face it, in a world full of people that might be full of crap, isn’t it refreshing to read something by someone who doesn’t take any crap?

According to the school’s website:

Highline Big Picture High School opened in 2005 and now has 125 students in 9th through 12th grades. Students refer to our school as a family. We are part of a growing network of over seventy innovative small schools around the country and internationally. At the core of our approach is developing close relationships with students and families, helping students identify what they are passionate about, and then harnessing this motivation to drive rigorous learning connected to real experiences in adult workplaces.

At Big Picture we believe we are doing our best work when each student is an active participant in his or her education, when his or her course of study is personalized by teachers, parents and mentors who know him or her well, and when school-based learning is blended with outside experiences such as internships that connect the learning to the real world beyond school. By these means we help students take responsibility for their own learning and prepare for success in college and beyond.

“That’s why we’ll follow the example of places like the Met Center in Rhode Island [the original Big Picture school] that give students that individual attention, while also preparing them through real-world, hands-on training for the possibility of succeeding in a career.”
Barack Obama, February, 2010
Address to U.S. Chamber of Commerce

You’ll be reading more of Philip’s work here on The B-Town Blog, including reviews like the one he did last week about the Hi-Liners’ “Les Miserables Student Edition,” which you can read here.

Our intern this year, Bryan Charles, of Highline School District’s innovative Big Picture High School, has completed his magnum opus animations of his original series “3 Frog. Bros.,” which we proudly present to you below.

If you know anything about animation, you know that it’s a long, laborious process. Now imagine you’re a 14-year old kid. You’ve learned Flash. You are a computer expert. You can draw and paint. You have a bunch of silly ideas and you want to make an animation.

Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself in to?

To understand, here’s some info directly from our Intern Artisté himself on how he does what he does:

Welcome! Welcome all to my wonderful, fabulous, candylicious, fat free, vacuum packed, deep fried, doctor approved, supercalifragilistic article on how I make my little cartoons!

Sometimes people tell me “Gee Whiz Bryan, how do you make such silly cartoons?” and of course I say “Mind your own business and let me finish my lunch!” and the person might be taken a little bit aback, and I say “Look guy, I’m sorry I snapped at you like that, maybe one day I’ll write about how I do it” and they say “Cool, but you’re kind of a jerk” and they walk off in a huff. So here is what I previously mentioned, I have written about how I animate and every single bit of hard work I have to go through to produce one of those cartoons that gets such low ratings.

Every cartoon starts off in an idea, and what I’ve learned from John K (The creator of Ren & Stimpy) is that a good story can come from putting your characters in any situation and seeing how they react. I’ve learned that this expands the character’s personality and vocabulary and makes them a little more relatable. So what I did with the Frog Bros is I gave it a basic outline, and the outline starts off an episode and I can finish it off however I want. Like for example: Green Frog has an addictive personality, and due to that, he can get obsessed over anything I want him to, so for starters, the mushroom. My very first cartoon was mildly inappropriate because it involved a hallucinogenic mushroom, and actually I got the idea from health class, it was something I knew nothing about so I got to have fun with it because there were no limitations to what a drug could do in a cartoon if nobody knows what it’s really capable of, you know what I mean? The teacher mentioned it once.. just once, so we didn’t know much about it, and due to that I could have the mushroom make Green do anything because nobody knew what it could do in real life at my school, I was almost abusing ignorance with that mushroom cartoon, when I started though I knew I had to keep going, I knew that it would be a small series, it would end up doing something, so I thought up two things. More episodes, and a half hour movie, the movie was a sad story, It grew from a 10 minute movie to a 20 minute movie to a half hour to 45 minutes to 100 minutes, and then I canceled it, a sad story but I did it, I almost put a contract out on it like in the gangster movies, but I still have my trailers up on Youtube if anybody is interested. After episode 1, I knew I kind of limited myself to some things, I learned that anything in episode 1 was pretty much concreted into the series, so Green became obsessed more, Yellow liked to take advantage once in awhile, and Purple was always kind of grumpy.

So episode 2 was just a rehash of episode 1 to a degree, it was the same kind of plot, but it followed my format, and I tried doing this for episode 3 as well, so I had this established set of characters and I needed a place to go, so I made episode 4 which took on some actual subjects like video games, and episode 5 was out of the format too, so I knew that I had a format after awhile, but I just started ignoring it, so I lightly traced the format and now I mostly work on the characters.

Sorry to hold you up, the way I get story ideas is that I sit with friends and we discuss what could the frogs do in any situation, and I’ve come up with some good ones that animation can limit for me, and I’ve come up with some good ones that I’m capable of doing. Writing a script takes a day for the first draft, and a full week to revise.

After the script is done, I begin animation, I draw out the scene and layer it, whatever body part goes where, and then I record Green, then I have my friends record their characters, and then I mix the audio and it melts into a scene, I do all of the scenes at different times and in different orders, and then I merge them into the final product, it’s much easier than working from start to finish.

Typically, a bad episode has been managed in a week, but my newest has taken 5 months due to hard drive failures and casting difficulty, also animation isn’t easy, especially with Flash, that program was not designed for frogs, their heads are hard for flash to comprehend because they’re too curvy, and then I have to do several drawings, it bothered me up to the point where I figured out Google Sketchup, and I use Google Sketchup for 3D rendering cars and buildings, any time the Frog Bros’ house is seen in episode 4 and up, it’s done in 3d, but sometimes I update the design. 3D is also a cool feature because not many 14 year olds are capable of doing flash, let alone 3d modeling, sound mixing, and voice recording, I’ve been told by my teachers that I’m ahead, I’m doing things that some people might not do until their 40′s, so I’m doing an amazing job for a low brow show.

The show is a big jumbeled mess, I forget what I’ve drawn, and I might redraw something, and sometimes I mess up with timing, and one philosophy is that I try something new in every episode until I’ve mastered the software, and since episode 1, I’ve learned a whole lot of neato effects. The show is done at 640×360 resolution or sometimes 1280×720 if I want it to be sharp HD quality, and both those screen sizes are 16: 9 which is widescreen, I animate at 24 frames per second and an average show is about 10 minutes, therefore the show has about 14,400 Frames in an average episode. If I ever decide to finish the movie, It would be 100 minutes making it 144,000 frames, which kind of gives me a headache thinking about all that work.

Just to gloat off what I do, I have to say that doing this show has become a big nightmare, it’s stressful, its unproductive, it’s tiresome, it’s too much work for me to do at times, and I don’t get a lot of payoff, but if I want a career, I’m going to have to toughen up because I have 5 more episodes planned out and I only have one hand for drawing.

Thank you very much for reading about how I do my work, I worked hard writing this and I hope it was worth my time, I will be around the next time I have a new cartoon to show, so farewell!

- Bryan, writer, animator, actor, sound editor

And now, here are Bryan’s final three animations; enjoy:

3 Frog Bros: Episode 1 (2nd Anniversary Edition) from Bryan Charles on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3 Frog Bros: Episode 6: A Turtlefying Adventure from Bryan Charles on Vimeo.

To see more of Bryan’s work, check out his blog here, and his Youtube channel here.

Our

As we mentioned before, Bryan is a budding young artist/animator, has a passion for comics, cartoons and humor, and his storytelling and Flash skills are coming along quite well.

Here’s what he has to say about this week’s “3 Frog Bros. Movie Trailer 3,” for which he does all the writing, animation and editing, in, as he says, “over 43,000 frames of animation”:

“This is the second to final trailer for my fantastic Flash movie, which has been 95% scripted and planned out.

I hope this trailer will tide my fans over…”

- Bryan Charles
Writer/Animator/Actor

Click here to view the embedded video.

To see more of Bryan’s work, click here.