WHAT THE HACK

Teaming up with co-hosts Adam Levin & Beau Freidlander, the artist Travis Millard and the animation studio Stephen Bones Productions, Toddy Stewart directed an award winning short animation for the award winning podcast What The Hack. The podcast, and the first film, featuring Al Franken, garnered a Webby nomination, a Telly Bronze, an AVA Gold, a Shorty and two Signal awards.

"Enlisting Emmy Award-winning director Toddy Stewart, we created short animated videos to promote new episodes featuring the art of renowned artist Travis Millard who drew caricatures of the Senators impersonated by Franken. This trailer was a new thing for us and wildly successful. The idea was to release the animated trailer on YouTube and also as a native file on Facebook and Twitter, and then promote the links to bring the episode to the attention of potential new listeners. It worked. The animation was widely viewed and Episode 71 “Al Franken Holds a Mock Senate Hearing on Privacy” reached our goal. Al Franken Podcast did a feed drop that reached 120K new listeners. We more than tripled our own downloads, with 2 million additional downloads from an Android-based auto-play carousel." - Adam Levin

Toddy Subsequently directed a couple more animations featuring Roy Wood Jr. and Malcom Nance.

Toddy has been involved with animation projects for many years, having put together, as editor/director, the ground breaking 5-a-Side series “Manchester Vs. Sao Paolo” with creative director Kevin Lyons and artist Todd “REAS” James, creating from scratch a kaleidoscopic re-branding piece for The Paris Review, and as executive post producer of the award winning “Albatross Soup,” directed by Winnie Cheung that would garner both Short of the Week’s “Short of the Year” and “Vimeo Staff Pick of the Year” in 2019.