What was your reason for moving to New York? Well, I got a job at CollegeHumor. So basically someone said they would pay me money to live in New York, so I moved here. I kind of always wanted to because I interned with CollegeHumor in 2008 when I was still in college and it was really great and a lot of fun. I basically just needed the impulse and finical backing to do it. How has New York impacted your work? New York is its own little world, and you’ll want to make a joke about like “How bad the subways are.” and then you’ll have to remember “Oh right, nobody else has those...” France would like those jokes maybe… get some big London Underground fans. Where in New York do you live? Here’s my exact address… How has the environment at CollegeHumor affected your work? It’s a really encouraging environment, I guess. You know, we’re just trying to make funny stuff for the internet, and you can be as experimental or inventive as you want. We’re always trying to keep up with everything that’s happening, and you know… everybody just wants to make good jokes. What have you worked on at CollegeHumor besides illustration? I’ve written one or two Hardly Workings. Then I wrote some video series, like this one called BearShark that came out recently which was an animation similar to Wile E. Cayote and the Roadrunner, but if Wile E Cayote always won. It involves these two characters, Bear and Shark, and they’re always chasing this guy named Steve. Doing that was really fun. I did
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all of these shows for the Nintendo 3DS video service, and you could download all the episodes and they were all in 3D which was really cool. Then I also did the show Dinosaur Office which was another one of my favorite things. So occasionally I’ll do videos for the site, when I have time. How’d you get the opportunity to work with Harry Partridge on BearShark? The fun thing about working for a big internet comedy company is that you have money to give to people. Initially Nintendo came to us and were like “we’re launching this Nintendo video service, and we want you guys to make some pilots for potential shows for it”. So we made five shows, Dinosaur Office, BearShark, Next Level, Duel, and Pizza Quest. So we made all of theses things for them and they just came back to us and said “We like these (Dinosaur Office and BearShark), now you can make full series out of them”. With BearShark we knew we wanted this kind of old-timey Warner Brothers style animation. So we reached out to Harry Partridge because he was the closet thing to someone who animates in Flash, but that doesn’t make characters that just slide into frame or just tween all over the place. I think he’s one of the best animators on the internet. Is all of your work made on the computer, or are there any analog aspects of your work? I’m pretty much 100% digital at this point. But one of the thing I like to do, if you go to my website loldwell.com you can see theres a little tab at the top that says “Postcards”. What I’ve started to do, just to keep in practice, is send post cards to people with a little drawing on it. Thats really the only traditional media time I get. But it’s really nice to get a little break, and actually sit away from the commuter. I do love digital, and I think it stream lines everything, but you definitely miss the feeling of a pen dragging across the paper. It’s a trade off.