January 18th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
Adam Paloian and his team at Pinreel Inc. are nominated for the 2024 “Best Sponsored” Annie Award for iconic duo Tenacious D’s Video Games music video. Paloian, who recently won an Emmy for The Cuphead Show, joins me to talk about working with Jack Black and Kyle Gass and directing this fast-paced showcase of animation, music and… of course… video games! (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Congratulations. You’ve had a big couple of months. Emmy win and now this. How have the last few months been for you, man?
Adam Paloian: Oh, it’s been pretty good. Yeah, it was a nice surprise. That Emmy was for… a Christmas episode of “Cuphead”, and I did that, I think, two years ago now. Animation takes a long time and then it takes another long time for it to premiere. So it was a nice surprise to win.
JM: Yeah, that’s gotta be a cool feeling. I know you were nominated in the past for “SpongeBob” as well. You’ve got the Emmy and now maybe the Annie. What was your reaction to hearing the news?
AP: I’m very honored about that. I was very proud of my crew’s work. They worked really hard on that, so it’s nice to get some acknowledgement. And it’s also an indie company. So it’s nice that they’re supporting that.
JM: Oh yeah. It’s awesome what the Annies does.
AP: A lot of the artists that worked on the music video were from around the world. So we had artists working in Thailand, some in Canada, some in Europe, and a lot of them spread across America. It was like maybe two or three artists that were just in California. Everyone worked remotely on it.
JM: Amazing. It’s 75 seconds of vivacious fun. How do you get in touch with Tenacious D and the collaboration process when it came to this?
AP: Well, it was very unexpected and spontaneous. So my friend Chris O’Neill, who worked on this as well… Jack Black reached out to him on Instagram. I guess his son was a fan of my friend Chris. He has a gaming channel. It goes in theme with the music video. Chris gave Jack Black a shout out. Jack Black’s son was like, “You got to reach out to him! You got to work with him!” So then Jack reached out to Chris and Chris is like, “Oh, Jack wants us to do a music video. He wants to do a music video together.” And I was like, “Well, we got to say yes to that. We got to do that.” So I had just started planning to do this production company, because there’s a project Chris and I are working on, and I was like, “This would be a great test to see how a production could work.” It’s the perfect opportunity, and we’re both huge Tenacious D fans, so it was a dream come true. And Jack Black was incredibly, incredibly easy to work with. I mean, he was very supportive. No notes. It was full trust, which was nice, because we had a short turnaround. It was a passion project for everybody. So the no notes really helped out. (laughs)
JM: That is amazing. Not even anything about how the two of them look and how you created animated versions of Jack and Kyle? They had no notes on that either?
AP: No. So… originally I sent over a couple sketches that we shared with Jack’s team and they just said, “Sure, go ahead.” And then we kind of got the green light. We just had to hit the ground moving. We had a short time to do this. It was a quick turnaround. So as I was sculpting stuff, we would send stuff in. Every week, I would send his team a few of the assets. I don’t think they were used to seeing this part of the process. So I was just sending them stuff to excite them. Like that troll that’s in the video or Jack’s turn around and Kyle. They have a good sense of humor, so they’re fine with being cartoonized.
JM: So what was your vision?
AP: We didn’t know what the song was at first. They just gave us the song, and then from that, I was thinking: when I work in TV animation, usually you work to the audio track. So it’s like: “What’s happening in the song? How is the song picking up speed?” It kind of dictates a lot of what you can do with the story. So we just dropped the song into a timeline in Adobe Animate and just went straight ahead. We just did straight ahead storyboarding. Very loose thumbnails. So we kind of figured out what the story was going to be with Kyle getting killed in the video game many times. We needed some sort of runner and it just kind of naturally started that Chris was like, “Oh, what if the troll crushes him?” And then it’s like, “Well, we got to do that more and more.” It was making us laugh. That let us drive the storyboard. So it was… the old way that the animators used to do it, where it’s like a storyboard driven.
And then the video games theme. I don’t play video games, so I had to ask Chris, who was storyboarding with me, “In God of War, is there a monster?” And he’s like, “Oh, there’s these trolls”. We wanted to do a tribute to that kind of look of those games. And then at the very end… my video game knowledge that I have… there’s a part where he’s changing all these costumes. “What are all the games I grew up with?” Just throw each of those in there, and then maybe a couple that I know people like today, like Minecraft, which I never even played. So that part people really like because… Jack knew his audience. It definitely appealed to a lot of his gaming crowd.
JM: And is this going to inspire you to play more video games now?
AP: (laughs) I like playing video games. Once in a while my girlfriend and I will play Mario Kart or some Nintendo games.
JM: I was going to ask you about the rhythm of it, because the song is so fast. Is it weird to play the same two or three seconds over and over again to have to animate it just right?
AP: We heard that song like 10 million times. I mean, I’m still not sick of it. It’s a very catchy song. We had to play those scenes over and over and over and over again. Each of the actions that the characters were doing the cuts [while] playing to the rhythm of the song. We wanted to follow that. You want to work to the track. So the song dictated a lot of the filmmaking and the gags and the buildup to how fast we get into more cuts into different levels of that big thing — all these different kinds of video game art styles. And at the very end there’s that big sun shot with Jack standing in front of it. There’s a lot of Red Dead Redemption stuff in that song, so you need some sort of plastic sun… big shower — like a beautiful desert scene to kind of end it off, and then end with a little gag. They set it up so well where the beginning of the song has a little bit of banter and the very end has that bookend bit of banter. So it feels like it was a natural cartoon. Like Betty Boop.
JM: Yeah, how about the fact that you do a Mario version of him? And this was around the time of the movie coming out and him being Bowser, right?
AP: Yeah, that was intentional. I was thinking when we were approached by this that I was like, “Well, there’s that Mario movie happening. It’s definitely good timing, good planning to have that kind of song come out around that time.” I was like, “We have to throw in some references to things that fans will like.” And we squeezed in that Mario reference at the end, and people were like, “Maybe we should make him a Bowser”, and I’m like, “No, he’s already Bowser! We gotta make him something different. Make him Mario.”
JM: And now he’s in the Minecraft movie! How crazy is that?
AP: I know. He’s Minecraft in this video. I’m glad he’s doing it. That’s gonna be big.
JM: Maybe you enticed him to get involved in the Minecraft movie. You’re gonna, you’re gonna have to ask him because he’s nominated for the Annie Award for voicing Bowser. So maybe he’ll be at the show.
AP: He also won an Emmy the night after I did for “Kung Fu Panda [The Dragon Knight]”.
JM: What is your company involved in next? What are you diving into? You said this was a test / trial and clearly it’s gone really well. So what are your goals now?
AP: Well, I want to keep working with the same crew. I love working with everybody. Olav Berman, was running the animation side. He was a huge part of this project. So, working more with him. There’s two projects I have coming up. They’re both NDA right now. Early days. They might be both TV things. And my goal with this is to do original animation — original stories, some of my own projects I have in development… for TV and online. It’s harder now to do originals with television and streaming. There’s so much change that’s happening right now. So I wanted to invest in starting a company because I wanted to take all my years of experience and climbing up the ladder for the past 10 years… All that knowledge I’ve learned and trying to absorb from every department, learning how everybody works, and trying to put that into a company, so I could hire people that I trust and know and build a company with my favorite people. These two projects I have coming up I’m really excited about. They’re both something that I’m directing and producing. I’m trying to get really good talent involved. I like casting people based on their strengths and their interests, so I have a lot of people in mind for how to build these projects — how to pair people together to execute the vision really well.
For [inspiration for] the Jack and Kyle characters I was looking at old view masters — the old Hanna Barbera view master slides. And I wanted them to look like these kind of tactile toys. What I want to push more in these other upcoming projects is, “What can I do with 3D that hasn’t been done with CG before?” And I think there’s a lot of potential for that right now, and you can kind of see it happening with “Spider Verse” and “Ninja Turtles”. There’s a lot of things you can do with CG now that you couldn’t do five or 10 years ago. People are coming back to CG and realizing all this other potential with it.
JM: I love that you’re supporting original ideas — original animation. I think there is a huge audience for that. Are you thinking about an Annie Awards speech?
AP: When I went to the Emmys, I didn’t fully prepare. So I just wrote a list of names. That’s sort of what I want to have. I’m better off the cuff. Thanking the team and Tenacious D. This whole thing would not be possible without Chris, Jack Black and Kyle Gass. Jack paid out of pocket for this project. He was really, really supportive. Every artist on the crew was incredibly important. If you look at everything on screen, it was carefully put together by somebody. I’m just really proud of the artists and thankful that they helped get it done because we got it done on time. That was a really, really fast project. Like a couple months. We had to think on our toes. And what I really love with my crew is everybody kind of tech supported each other as well. We were working around the clock and people were working in other countries. So sometimes it’s 4 in the morning and I’m talking to these people and it was really fun. It was one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve ever worked on. And even though it’s only a minute and 15 seconds, it felt like you’re making a TV show because there’s so much happening.
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