Today we’d like to introduce you to Noah Cutwright.
Hi Noah, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’ve loved animation since I was a kid really, but I think the “aha” moment for me had to be the summer between 3rd and 4th grade. That year my mom took my sister and I to the library, and I checked out the 2004 edition of The Art of Walt Disney. That was the moment that I realized that animation was a legitimate career path. I pretty much knew if I had to grow up, I was going to do this. I remember when I was 12 years old for Christmas, I asked my parents to get me the home version of Toon Boom’s animation software. I spent middle and high school days trying to teach myself how to bring my stories to life through animation. I would spend my evenings and weekends working on short films and even a full-length feature.
Eventually, I went on to attend the Cleveland Institute of Art, where I got my BFA in animation, where my thesis film, Floyd, was a semi-finalist in the Student Academy Awards. I finally decided to make the move to LA at the beginning of 2022 to fully pursue my career in animation, and in the past year and a half, I’ve created a few adult swim bumpers, did storyboard work on the Disney Channel series, Saturdays, directed and produced (through my production company, Imaginex Animation Studios, LLC,) the 12-minute animated short, “The Opener” which was opening act to Niles Abston’s second hour-long comedy special, “household name”, and most recently I’ve been writing and animating a series of animated shorts for Comedy Central’s social media pages. It’s been quite the ride since moving to LA.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t always been the smoothest ride. I think a lot of my experience as an artist has been marked by feelings of self-doubt. I’ve always been a big dreamer ever since I was very young. I wanted to create, write and direct. When I was a kid, my dreams always felt so out of reach and larger than life, and as an adult, I’ve had times where I felt like a fool for pursuing them. I got out of college with an award-winning animated short and struggled to find work, which was sort of a humbling experience for me. I think I would see a lot of my friends in non-entertainment professions find themselves in jobs they trained for fresh out of school and start to fear that I had done something wrong because that wasn’t my experience. I started to feel as though there was a certain implausibility or even impossibility to the things I was trying to accomplish. But occasionally, I’ve had to stop and remind myself to be kinder to and more patient with myself, and instead of asking “Why me?” to start asking “Why not me?” Because I was making strides, but when you’re in it, it’s much harder to see that. In fact, it’s in answering these questions for this article right now that I’m realizing how far I’ve come, haha.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a cartoonist, director, screenwriter, and animator. I am currently most known as the creator of the comic strip “The Carsons” which I am currently developing into a half-hour animated mockumentary sitcom.
The series follows the life of a young black cartoonist named Steve Carson trying to make it in LA with his new family. Which includes his wife, Katie, their baby, Nicole, and Buddy, a washed-up R&B singer now demoted to family dog. The series is a satirical parody of black culture and American society and is an examination of what it really means to be a young black adult trying to get your life started in today’s world
I wrote the pilot a couple of years back, and now, after a successful Kickstarter in late 2021, I’m currently directing it with a small team of amazing and talented artists.
The project stars myself as Steve Carson, Angelica Houston as Katie Carson, Niles Abston as Buddy, Demetrick McDonald as Larry, Steve’s best friend, and Baldwin Williams as Pops (Steve’s father) and is a project very near and dear to me. Can’t wait to share more with everyone and I think myself, the artists, and the cast behind this are making something really special.
I always knew I wanted to make this show and as opposed to waiting for someone else to give me the green light. I decided to green-light myself.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I actually initially created The Carsons comic strip in 2011 when I was going into my sophomore year of high school. My folks had told me it would be a great idea to get involved in extracurricular activities, as it would be attractive on college applications. Being that it took me 45 minutes to get to school every day, I couldn’t imagine staying even longer after school just to be able to fill in a box on a college application. The only logical extracurricular activity to me seemed to be working for the school’s newspaper as a cartoonist. I’d be able to work remotely (I was doing it before it was cool), and I would get to spend time doing something that I already enjoyed doing. Only problem was I didn’t know what to draw. Then, late in the summer of 2011, I drew the first drawings of what would end up being, The Carsons and cobbled together the first set of strips before delivering them to the newspaper.
At the time, I thought it would be fun to imagine what life would be like for me ten years into the future. So, I drew up a semi-fictionalized version of myself in the character of Steve, a newspaper cartoonist, his wife Katie, their newborn baby Nicole, and their dog, Buddy. So I would draw and write the daily comic strip for my high school’s newspaper, and it got quite a bit of attention, and I even eventually expanded it into an award-winning monthly animated short series for Baltimore County’s Education Channel. By the time 2014 rolled around I felt like it was time to close the book on the story of the Carson family. I was graduating high school, and I felt like I had said everything I could possibly need to say with these characters, and it was time to grow up and move onto new and exciting things.
Then, I graduated college. Years of odd jobs, freelance, various relationships, and I started to realize I was getting to be the same age that Steve Carson was in the comics I initially wrote in 2011, and as that happened, I realized something important. This adult shit is a lot worse than I imagined it was, and suddenly I had a renewed interest in a story I thought I had already finished telling. I also wanted to revamp this series. To give myself the opportunity to bitch and moan about the complicated thing that it is to actually be in your mid-twenties in the 21st century. A time in your life when everyone is pretending to know what they’re doing, you start to notice your parents aging for the first time, and most importantly, you start to realize the systems you worked so hard to learn and work to be apart of are complete bullshit.
Pricing:
- Animation Services: $5000-6500 per minute of animation
- The Carsons Vol 1: 10th Anniversary Carsons Comics Collection (Digital Download) $5
Contact Info:
- Website: www.noahcutwright.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatcartoonistguy/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-cutwright-5bba6710b/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@IMAGINEXANIMATIONSTUDIOS
- Other: www.imaginexanimation.com
Image Credits
IMG_0177: Still from Niles Abston’s The Opener (2022) directed by Cutwright IMG_3787: Still from Niles Abston’s The Opener (2022) directed by Cutwright
