4.5-minute sizzle reel for TV series pitch based on a popular true-crime comedy podcast, heavily featuring original animation.

Roles: Writer, Senior Producer, Video Editor, Animator

Client: Invent TV

Invent TV wanted to adapt a popular podcast, “Small Town Murder,” hosted by comedians James Pietragallo and Jimmie Whisman, for television, and asked me to produce a pitch reel. The podcast features the incredibly unusual combination of comedy and true crime, …so it was destined to be a hit. The approach to the TV adaptation would be adding animation to the hosts’ usual storytelling format.

I suggested this particular animation style, and it was embraced immediately. The hope being that we could use as much of the real photos and documents from the actual cases as possible within the animated recreations, (a tactic I first used when creating somewhat similarly styled animations for the documentary pitch, “Fugitive Hunters: Invisible Webb.”) The big idea being that the words within those documents are being literally brought to life by the animations.

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, and ultimately cobbled together the finished product.