PORTUGAL. THE MAN: “WHAT, ME WORRY?”
Portugal. The Man is an award-winning Portland, Oregon-based alternative rock band. I created character sheets and 2D animated assets for this project.
THE ASK
To create a character walk cycle and a set of effects
animations for Portugal. The Man’s music video “What, Me Worry?”.
The animations needed to capture the playful, stylized tone of the video while remaining technically clean and adaptable. The final deliverables were exported as transparent .mov files, making it easy for the team at Kamp Grizzly to integrate the animations seamlessly into the larger production.
CHARACTER SHEET + ROUGH ANIMATIONS
This project was all about channeling that old-school, rubberhose cartoon energy. The band provided a single illustration of the character, and one of the biggest challenges was transforming that static drawing into a full turnaround that could move and stretch like it stepped right out of a 1930s short.
To get there, I deconstructed the artwork into simple, bendy shapes that could hold up across perspective shifts. The cartoony style made it fun to exaggerate motion—squash and stretch, floppy limbs, and smooth arcs—but it also required careful planning to keep the proportions consistent as the character rotated.
I sketched a series of rough animation tests in Procreate on the iPad, leaning into the quirks of rubberhose animation while figuring out how the shapes would swing and flow from one angle to the next. Those tests became the backbone of the final turnaround, proving that even a single static illustration can come to life with the right mix of technical problem-solving and cartoon charm.
DIRECT CONTRIBUTIONS
I created all of the hand-drawn assets for the music video, drawing heavily from Cuphead and classic 1940s animation.
The style leaned into rubber hose techniques, exaggerated facial expressions, and the bouncy timing of vintage cartoons to capture that old-school charm.Two of the most rewarding parts of the project were animating the walk cycle and the head-on shots—both required careful planning to stay consistent while still pushing the cartoony exaggeration that makes the style so fun.
On top of that, I also took on effects animation for the first time, creating smoke, fire, and explosions. To get it right, I dedicated a full day to researching traditional frame-by-frame effects, learning how classic animators approached these elements, and applying those principles to my own work. The result was a playful mix of character animation and hand-drawn effects that felt true to the golden-age aesthetic while still carrying the rhythm and energy of the music.
