Jim Tews animates.

I started as an amusement park caricature artist, left my hometown to spend four years in the military, then pursued my interests in visual storytelling through film school at Cleveland State. I relocated to New York and built up my skill set by working in various production roles that required a little bit of everything: writing, storyboarding, editing, motion graphics, animation, etc.

In the last five years, as software has made animation more accessible (and a little less tedious) I’ve been able to put it all together to create short-form animated content from the ground up. Sometimes for myself, sometimes for clients.

Client Projects

Personal Projects

I’ve been writing and performing standup for years, and love finding ways to turn that into animated content.

Created with After Effects, Blender, and Adobe Character Animator
Created with Photoshop, Premiere, and Adobe Character Animator
Created with Photoshop, Character Animator, After Effects, and Premiere

Character Art

Early turnaround for a personal project called “Tapes From The Void”
Style options for Drew Barrymore as a cat for segments on The Drew Barrymore Show.
Drew Barrymore as a cat, and her kids, Frankie & Olive as kittens.
Final segment featuring Frankie & Olive

Simple turns for an animated standup bit called “Garage Sales” by Colin Moulton for 800lb Gorilla Records.

Storyboards

Selection from a story in progress for Pixar’s Story Xperiential program.
A segment animating a story from Leslie Jones from a documentary about warm-up comics.