Since the summer of 2024, a universe of surreal animated characters have been surfacing on social media channels under the title of KrumbleTV. The manic, satirical, and often absurd clips feature men, women, children and talking animals in coffee-break-sized comedy sketches with biting humor and often unnerving computer animation, each averaging two minutes.
The currently 100-plus KrumbleTV sketches feature audio based on online comedy lodestones from Instagram sketch comedy groups to South Park, and star an eerie ensemble of characters animated in Unreal Engine 5 with Metahuman Animator. With the exception of a few oddball celebrity cameos, including a manic Matthew McConnaughey and a pallid Millennium-era Michael Jackson, ninety percent of the KrumbleTV cast are based on the likeness of their creator, Russian-born video artist ‘Dmitrii B’ (Dimitrii requested anonymity for participation in the Cartoon Brew article).
In person, the former drama student, currently resident in Texas, is hyper-focused, thoughtful, and articulate, and at 29-years-old much less haggard and chaotic than his KrumbleTV personae. Dmitrii gained his taste for performance studying and performing theater in Russia, and then emigrated to the States to pursue a degree in video game design. “That was my passion,” he recently told Cartoon Brew. “However, I was never able to finish that degree. I was led more by my passion for art and I realized I cannot work on something which doesn’t bring me joy. I tried visual effects. I then applied that knowledge to music videos. That was when I started trying to do something myself. And I switched to 3d just six months ago.”
Dmitrii’s experiments in 3d animation began in Blender, which he incorporated into Adobe Premiere and After Effects, all self-taught. “I believe everyone can open Youtube and find information they need,” he observed. “You’ve got to be passionate about it.”
After his interests gravitated from video games to music video production, Dmitrii broadened his pallet with visual effects, which led him to 3d. “It was a new planet with a new oxygen that I didn’t know how to breathe,” he said. “It was scary. I opened the program to see so many buttons. I cried. I came back later, because what else I should do in my life? And so, I learned Blender to create some simple additions to my visual effects.”
Unreal’s rollout of its Metahuman digital human animation package further kindled Dmitrii’s artistic instincts. “It was like a breath of wind. When Metahuman arrived it was an opportunity for me to make more advanced characters without modeling in ZBrush or Blender.”
The modularity of the Metahuman system, tied with motion capture capabilities, enabled him to apply his experience to animation using his own likeness, adapted to a menagerie of digital 3d puppets. “The question was ‘Who are my characters?’” he said. “If I’m doing episodes every two days, I need to create a character for different episodes. Or, maybe create a universal character. Then, an idea clicked in my head. I realized that people were making selfie-style comedy on their phones, doing a classic maneuver when they dress in different characters. That is what I did. I made a scan of myself, and I copied my face and projected it on different characters, with slight changes.”
Spicing the mix, Dmitrii added a few custom celebrity characters, including a simulacrum of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar mode, and a character from FX Network tv show, Atlanta, based on Donald Glover in prosthetic makeup: “There was an episode when they made a parody on Michael Jackson, Teddy Perkins, who was like a white version of Michael Jackson. A very funny, charismatic character. I also made him in 3d and people recognized him.”
Dmitrii’s taste for off-beat, satirical humor stems from his theatrical training, and his appreciation for his peers in modern media. “I believe that comedy is the most complicated genre,” he said, “and maybe the feeling of drama and the feeling of theater helped me to understand the idea of putting emotions into plot and visuals. However, I’m more about visuals than the plot. I plot with visuals, and make narrative through the environment.”
He explained his process: “My main inspiration comes from classic tv shows I grew up on, like South Park, and Family Guy. When I jumped into this industry of comedy on Instagram, I realized that there are many brand new creators. Some of them are well established. But my major success I believe, has been to take those humor references, typical American edgy sense of humor, with a salty, toxic sense of humor. I grew up on that. For me, it’s like listening to a song. I listen to the audio, in the same way I used to listen to music and come up with script treatments for music videos. Now, when I rewatch a South Park or Family Guy, I don’t watch the visuals; I imagine, and the storyboard ideas come into my head. When I have the direction, and know what kind of visual jokes I will put into the video, I open my After Effects program or Premiere Pro, I make a timeline, I create the digital screen board, and make time stamps to plan how long each shot will be. At the end of that, I know how many shots I’ll need. I open Unreal Engine, and I prepare the environments, either already made, or I create new ones by adjusting models or adding props. For instance, I might add T-shirt or a picture on a wall with my ‘special thanks’ to my [Patreon] supporters, adding that to the visual design.”
Dmitrii self-captures his face and body performances simultaneously, using Sony Mocopi, a Rokoko Smartsuit II, and a helmet-mounted iPhone. “It’s like singing in the shower,” he said. “I’m feeling very playful. I find it interesting to play different roles, to put myself in different situations, and experience different emotions. It’s funny, and it’s super exciting. I don’t read through the role. It’s more about the comedy and exaggerated facial emotions.”
His camera work in Unreal is similarly uninhibited, with wild push-ins and dramatic wide-angle closeups, which Dmitrii attributes to cinematic influences: “My favorite filmmakers are Denis Villeneuve who made Dune, or [cinematographer] Roger Deakins who shot 1917. Villeneuve has epic scale and symmetry, which reminds me of a very modern [Stanley] Kubrick.” Dmitrii then renders shots in After Effects, assembles shots to his timeline, and adds to the sound design as needed. His average turnaround, from concept to upload, takes eight hours.
One notable piece on Youtube, Brother May I Have Some Oats?, is a nightmarish Animal-Farm-like dialog between two pigs, which puts a gothic horror spin on a 2017 spoken-comedy sketch delivered by anonymous deep-voiced voiceover artist Burialgoods. Dmitrii plays the face of each argumentative hog, one with a mustache that unintentionally resembles Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The pigs are both based on me,” he asserted. “I didn’t mean one to look like a political figure. In fact, I made a video of an election style video with a president giving a speech that felt like a more Skibidi sense of humor. I’ve distanced myself from that currently. My algorithm doesn’t like it when I play with politics.”
The pig video, instead, plays out with grotesque imagery of a nocturnal farmyard of undulating weeds, and glowing fireflies that float like embers around the two human-faced animals, with flashbacks to their tall skinny overlords who gnaw on pork products in a village square.
Dmitrii created the farmyard with procedural effects that make undergrowth sway in the wind, and generated the European-style village from an Epic Games freeware model that he adapted and populated with villagers based on himself in multi-gender roles. The video hit a nerve, he believes, due to the sketch’s cult status in online pop culture. “There’s a nostalgia feeling tied to the cultural specifics,” he observed. “That’s why I’m using the same actors, and the same audio. If we see something familiar, we feel happier. And I think some comedy has an innocent sense of humor, which works alongside with that nostalgic feeling.”
Most of KrumbleTV’s traffic stems from Instagram and Tiktok, where videos score millions of views. The response has led the solo artist to contemplate creative collaboration. “The idea is to find a friend who will be an amazing comedian, who will be as ambitious as me,” Dmitrii added. “They’ll come up with audio, I’ll come up with the visuals, and together we’ll create new property.”
