Artist of the Day: Ryan Quincy

Ryan Quincy worked for well over a decade as part of the South Park production crew as an animator, animation director and supervisor. On the side he also created several music videos over the years which can be seen on his website.

After a long period of development and pitching that began in 2008, which included three shorts produced for FOX, Ryan’s show Out There recently premiered as IFC’s first animated series.

Ryan shared some artwork and photos of whiteboard doodles from the production which is written and boarded by Ryan and a small team in Los Angeles, and then sent to Bento Box Entertainment’s satellite studio in Atlanta, which draws from the talent pool established there by the various Adult Swim productions.

I was considering using some business-jargon to describe this bi-coastal production to a draw contrast with shows that ship animation to Asia–“in-sourcing” came to mind–but while trying to verify if I was using the terminology correctly I came upon this gem on Wikipedia, and decided to call the whole thing off:

The prefixes to “-sourcing” and “-shoring” remain in flux: Outsourcing gave rise to the term in-sourcing, and offshoring resulted in on-shoring. However, onshoring is sometimes called in-shoring. Insourcing is sometimes named “backsourcing”. Insourcing may be done by “onshoring”, “offshoring” or just “remotely”.

Anyway, the animation is done in Atlanta.

Ryan says that he drew from his childhood experience growing up in the midwest U.S. when he created Out There. The quirky designs of the characters also stem directly from the type of doodles that Ryan says he has been drawing since he was a kid, drawing inspiration from the work of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Ub Iwerks, Jim Henson and a stew of others.