Skullicorn: a hybrid creature that combines the visual elements of a skull and a unicorn, often featuring a skull-shaped head with a horn. Draw it in your sketchpad or consider it as a tattoo? Cool. Animate it as a bumper for Adult Swim? Now you’ve really got our attention!

“Skullicorn was created as a surreal, darkly adorable stop-motion bumper for Adult Swim,” animator Lindsay Berkebile told us. “Everything in the piece was built practically—we really wanted it to feel tactile and handmade, even in its weirdness.”

Weird? Sure, in all the best ways. But also vibrant and full of unique textures of varied opacity that we know could not have been easy to pull off.

“The rainbows were one of our favorite elements,” Berkebile went on, “we bent heated acrylic into shape, lit them from below, and layered colored gels over the surface to get that vivid rainbow glow.

“Shout out to our Art Director, Doug Cummings, for teching this entire build and our DP Jake Hauswirth for rocking such challenging lighting design! The trees were built from textured cardboard tubes and painted, with the foliage made from a mix of graphic paper cutouts, moss, and grass textures.”

The Skullicorn puppet comes off as ingeniously creepy and wonderous all at once. Made using a wire armature with a foam body, the skull is a hard sculpt, “designed and crafted by the famous ThriftCreeper. The rest of the puppet is actually layered black wrap sandwiched between paper to create a furry feather graphic kind of look.

“We wanted some chatter but not TOO much which is why the black wrap was important. We used motion control sliders and focus motors to add the slow creep of a camera move. Also, the rainbow goop the Skullicorn is devouring? That’s a concoction of colored clay and Quake Gel—we also used the same material for the logo design!”

Too cool. When we asked Berkebille if the team encountered any significant challenges, she answered, “So many! Our biggest challenge was creating something that felt high-budget with a shoestring budget. We spent almost nothing on materials, so creative problem-solving was a huge part of the process.

“Fabricating and lighting the rainbows practically was a major R&D challenge—we wanted them to feel magical but grounded, which is a tricky balance. And animating that goop? Brutal. It doesn’t behave well with gravity, so we had to animate fast and carefully to avoid unintentional squish or slide between frames. We also shot the logo part backwards so that the [AS] stayed pristine in the end and we ensured to nail it perfectly that way.”

Sounds like the team’s VFX artist, James Morr, also had a lot of cleanup with a long camera move and rigs: “We ensured to do as much mitigation in pre to avoid headaches for him though! Paul Zito, our 2D artist and I also spent a long time talking about how to transition from stopmo into 2D to make it… make sense… weird but not jarring. He really nailed it in the end!”

We couldn’t agree more and loved hearing Berkebile’s next comment.

“Honestly, the whole shoot was a challenge—but in the best way. Every part of it required a bit of ingenuity, which is what makes stop-motion so fun (and maddening!).”