Stylized animations humorously recreating true crime stories as told by James Pierragallo and Jimmie Whisman on their popular podcast, “Small Town Murder.”

I was asked to create these animations for a pitch reel I was to produce that would use this same approach to adapt the podcast for television. I suggested this particular animation style, and it was embraced immediately. The first step was to comb through a number of their episodes, (homework I absolutely did not mind,) and select some of the funniest moments. But, the tricky part was that these moments must be funny on their own, meaning the jokes couldn’t rely on knowing the full context of each individual story. After the always painful process of narrowing down the selections, (and leaving so much gold on the cutting room floor,) I edited the selected scenes down for time into snappier sound bites. I then created storyboards for each scene, before turning those storyboards into animatics. Once I had approval on all the scenes, based on the animatics, I set to work collecting the source images, (a combination of actual documents/photos from the true crimes and copious stock imagery,) and ultimately cobbled together what you see here entirely in After Effects.

A somewhat subtle touch that viewers may or may not immediately pick up on is that I weaved court documents and newspaper articles from the crimes into the scenes wherever possible; in the walls and floors, in the clouds, in clothing, etc. This was a move I borrowed from myself, having first used it when creating somewhat similarly styled animations for the documentary pitch, “Fugitive Hunters: Invisible Webb.” The big idea behind it is that the words within those documents are being literally brought to life by the animations.