Juan Baez: Adult Swim
Making a living and proving cartoons aren’t just for kids.
Full Sail grad Juan Baez
Full Sail Recording Arts grad Juan Baez has hit the jackpot, landing a job with the holy grail of animated comedy: Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
Based in Atlanta, Adult Swim is the after-hours block of Cartoon Network where a loyal audience can feed their insomnia with a healthy dose of eccentric smart cartoons.
Juan Baez is one of those viewers. Instead of spending his precious early morning hours asleep, Juan makes use of these pre-dawn hours for cartoon binges, which he considers essential market research. As an engineer for Atlanta’s Soapbox Studios, a downtown recording studio as witty and upbeat as the projects they produce, Juan is right in the middle of the action. Because Turner’s Cartoon Network and Adult Swim’s Williams Street production companies are just a few miles away, “a lot of the voice talents, especially for Adult Swim, are in Atlanta,” he says. And that gives Soapbox the almost-exclusive honor of dealing with some of cartoon’s biggest names.
If cartoon characters like Space Ghost and Zorak are celebrities anywhere, it’s here, and Juan gets to work, face-to-face, with the voice talents behind these popular characters. Last year, “I did the voice over record for one of the Space Ghost DVD commercials,” he says. “I got to record the person who does the voice of Zorak, C. Martin Croker, and that was pretty awesome.” Juan also created the long running commercial for late-night anime series s-CRY-ed. For Juan, the best part of being involved with Adult Swim’s shows is the opportunity to get “behind the kind of creative people who can just get in the booth and go nuts with a character without any kind of script.”
This perfect job didn’t fall directly into Juan’s lap after graduation though. He had a rough three-month job search, turned job juggle. "I needed money so I had to do Domino’s Pizza, Cirque du Soleil, and I landed an internship at Soapbox all in the same month,” Juan says. As an intern, Juan routinely impressed the recording engineers in the studio. “I was doing a lot of tape dubbing, Digibeta tape dubbing – I organized all their backups.” After the internship ended, “I started getting paid and got into an assistant position where I sat with another engineer for a few times. I wasn’t assisting for long before I went full-time engineer.”
Since going solo at Soapbox, Juan has been handed several high-profile 2D clients. “I recently worked on the DVD commercials for Sealab Volume 2 and Brak Show Volume 1 DVD, which is really a odd commercial to work on," Juan says. During its run, Juan was also one of two engineers for Stroker and Hoop and the second engineer for Harvey Birdman. For Birdman, “I used to do prebuilds and beginning sweetening, and he [main engineer Michael Kohler] would do final sweetening and mixing.” Although it’s not one of Juan’s projects, Soapbox Studios is also hard at work on the full length Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.
Juan also regularly takes his work home with him. And with the help from fellow Full Sail grad Tony Bullard, “we did a metal remix of the Aqua Teen [theme song]. We got it to the right people and they were like, ‘what do we have to do to get this on the DVD?’” The metal track landed on the fan art section of Aqua Teen Season 4.
Recently, Juan and Tony did it again, making a song for the new show Daughter of the Devil. “Instead of doing a remix, we just did a whole new song that had to do with the show. We got it to the right people and they loved it,” Juan says.
Being a cartoon fan not only makes Juan’s job more enjoyable, it also makes him a valuable resource to many of Soapbox’s clients. “There are several clients from Adult Swim that have asked for me because they know I’m watching this stuff, and I’m still their target demographic,” he explains. Juan admits that fact can make for a tongue-tied situation, “when you’re being taken out to dinner with a bunch of clients and they’re asking you what your favorite cartoon on Adult Swim is.” Juan is happy to give his feedback, but jokingly adds that “if the creators of Stroker and Hoop ask you if you like Family Guy or The Simpsons better, you have to pick your answers wisely.”
Click for: samples of Juan and Tony’s work.
Based in Atlanta, Adult Swim is the after-hours block of Cartoon Network where a loyal audience can feed their insomnia with a healthy dose of eccentric smart cartoons.
Juan Baez is one of those viewers. Instead of spending his precious early morning hours asleep, Juan makes use of these pre-dawn hours for cartoon binges, which he considers essential market research. As an engineer for Atlanta’s Soapbox Studios, a downtown recording studio as witty and upbeat as the projects they produce, Juan is right in the middle of the action. Because Turner’s Cartoon Network and Adult Swim’s Williams Street production companies are just a few miles away, “a lot of the voice talents, especially for Adult Swim, are in Atlanta,” he says. And that gives Soapbox the almost-exclusive honor of dealing with some of cartoon’s biggest names.
If cartoon characters like Space Ghost and Zorak are celebrities anywhere, it’s here, and Juan gets to work, face-to-face, with the voice talents behind these popular characters. Last year, “I did the voice over record for one of the Space Ghost DVD commercials,” he says. “I got to record the person who does the voice of Zorak, C. Martin Croker, and that was pretty awesome.” Juan also created the long running commercial for late-night anime series s-CRY-ed. For Juan, the best part of being involved with Adult Swim’s shows is the opportunity to get “behind the kind of creative people who can just get in the booth and go nuts with a character without any kind of script.”
This perfect job didn’t fall directly into Juan’s lap after graduation though. He had a rough three-month job search, turned job juggle. "I needed money so I had to do Domino’s Pizza, Cirque du Soleil, and I landed an internship at Soapbox all in the same month,” Juan says. As an intern, Juan routinely impressed the recording engineers in the studio. “I was doing a lot of tape dubbing, Digibeta tape dubbing – I organized all their backups.” After the internship ended, “I started getting paid and got into an assistant position where I sat with another engineer for a few times. I wasn’t assisting for long before I went full-time engineer.”
We got it to the right people and they loved it.
Juan Baez
Juan also regularly takes his work home with him. And with the help from fellow Full Sail grad Tony Bullard, “we did a metal remix of the Aqua Teen [theme song]. We got it to the right people and they were like, ‘what do we have to do to get this on the DVD?’” The metal track landed on the fan art section of Aqua Teen Season 4.
Recently, Juan and Tony did it again, making a song for the new show Daughter of the Devil. “Instead of doing a remix, we just did a whole new song that had to do with the show. We got it to the right people and they loved it,” Juan says.
Being a cartoon fan not only makes Juan’s job more enjoyable, it also makes him a valuable resource to many of Soapbox’s clients. “There are several clients from Adult Swim that have asked for me because they know I’m watching this stuff, and I’m still their target demographic,” he explains. Juan admits that fact can make for a tongue-tied situation, “when you’re being taken out to dinner with a bunch of clients and they’re asking you what your favorite cartoon on Adult Swim is.” Juan is happy to give his feedback, but jokingly adds that “if the creators of Stroker and Hoop ask you if you like Family Guy or The Simpsons better, you have to pick your answers wisely.”
Click for: samples of Juan and Tony’s work.
