Michael Granberry is an animator on the Amazon show for pre-schoolers Tumble Leaf. The show has won multiple emmy awards in its first two seasons, and it’s something you don’t see much in kids’ TV anymore; it’s quiet. It’s thoughtful, it doesn’t go for a lot of jokes. It’s a simple show that is anything but simple for the team at BixPix to create. Michael will tell us how he fell in love with the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, how he shifted from the horror gen

Eric Robles created the Nick show “Fanboy and Chum Chum.” He’s currently in the process of creating his second show for Nickelodeon, “Glitch Techs,” which won’t come out until sometime in 2018. Eric is a self-taught artist, and the story of how he got from the path to becoming a police officer to his first job in animation is an incredibly inspiring one. I’m excited for you to hear it. Thanks so much to Eric Robles for that great conversation, thanks to Audrey Gray at nick fo

If you grew up in the 80s, Aaron Simpson’s story may be familiar to you, especially if you grew up wanting to make movies. He’ll tell us about the animated shorts he made by co-opting his dad’s 8mm camera. He’ll tell us how he switched to making ridiculous live-action videos with his friends once that technology became available… by co-opting his dad’s video camera. And you’ll also hear how he made a lot of connections in the animation industry through the blog he published a

Richard Kissel has been on a pretty direct path his entire life to where he is now as the Director of Public Programs at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Richard tells Mike how he's always been passionate about not only his love for dinosaurs, but about getting other people to love them to by understanding their history and complexity. Mike reads this sentence to Richard from his bio page: "Dr. Kissel's current scientific research focuses on the enigmatic group of Pa

The "Captain" part of Todd Forman's stage name might be an affect, but the "Doctor" part if 100% true. Mike tries to convince the horn player for the popular family-friendly Jelly of the Month Club band to write a book on time management or personal productivity after hearing that he is not only a professional musician (with Sublime and Sublime with Rome in addition to JOTMC), but also a practicing physician with his own family medicine clinic, a teacher who is deeply passion

Shane Portman was writing stories meant to be read aloud and creating characters meant to annoy his younger sisters for years before he realized he had been preparing himself for a career writing children's television. Shane now works on Amazon's Emmy-winning preschool show "Tumble Leaf," as well as for "Moonlight Story Time" on the Curious World app. Check out his website and learn more about how such a quiet guy can have so many characters and stories rolling around in his