ACLU's Know Your Rights University traces back to a Stoopid Buddy Stoodios stop-motion animator

A stop-motion animator's path from studio floor to civics education: Brandon Lake, previously catalogued here only as an animator/camera assistant at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (Robot Chicken, SuperMansion) with earlier stints at LAIKA and Sony Pictures Imageworks, is now the ACLU's Senior Creative Producer, Video & Animation. He created, wrote, directed and showruns Know Your Rights University (KYR-U), a stop-motion educational series made with animation studio Threadwood that premiered its four-episode first season on YouTube Kids and ACLU.org on April 23, 2026. Set at the fictional Eastman-Baldwin Junior High School, the series follows students Aaron and Lisa as they navigate student speech rights, censorship, the legislative process and other civics topics for a kids' audience -- an unusual but well-documented production credit for a former commercial stop-motion animator, and a reminder that the technique's community extends into advocacy and educational media outside the festival/studio circuit this catalogue usually tracks.