Francisco Guerrero Adds Character to Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects

What if there were special, life-giving mushrooms that could change the world? What if a hero with bold facial hair and a funny hat devoted his life to them? DigiPen MFA in Digital Arts graduate Francisco Guerrero (2015) has turned these unusual premises into an impressive career — first as a concept artist on Mario games at Nintendo Software Technology, and most recently as a character designer on Adult Swim’s acclaimed TV series, Common Side Effects, now streaming on HBO.

“The stars just aligned!” Guerrero says of his journey from the Mushroom Kingdom to the “Blue Angel” mushrooms at the center of Green Street Pictures’ new animated political thriller. The show follows the scrappy mycologist Marshall Cuso, whose discovery of a miracle mushroom in Peru capable of healing any illness or injury pulls him, his old high school lab partner Frances, and two eccentric FBI agents into a tangled web of big pharma conspiracies. Premiering earlier this year, the series quickly found success with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a Primetime Emmy nomination.

“I never thought I’d work on a show that has blown up like this has,” Guerrero says. “The Green Street team’s level of craftsmanship was really amazing to me. It feels awesome and so gratifying that I could collaborate with them and be a part of this.”

Just like Marshall Cuso, Guerrero’s own mushroom-centric adventures began in Latin America, where he and two friends founded a small 2D animation studio, Lapis Lazuli, in Mexicali, Mexico. “We had been working for about two years when I first applied to DigiPen. It was kind of a group effort actually,” Guerrero says. “We all wanted to do more ambitious stuff and expand our skills, mainly to learn 3D tools, and we all decided to go to DigiPen.” In 2012, his studio partners headed to Redmond for DigiPen’s MS in Computer Science and MFA in Digital Arts programs. Guerrero followed suit and joined the MFA program himself in 2013 the following year.

After digging into the 3D tools and production pipelines he’d come to DigiPen to learn, Guerrero put those new skills into practice on his thesis project, a comedic 3D short film about transitioning into the afterlife, Orientation Center for the Unseen. “It was a great experience, I really liked collaborating on my film team with people from different parts of the world,” Guerrero says. “It was interesting to have international team members with different points of view on how to tell this story and bring it to reality.”

Although Guerrero came to DigiPen with dreams of working in animated film, his strong portfolio and the recommendation of a friend landed him a job at Nintendo Software Technology (NST) less than a year after graduating, where he began working on user interface design for the most iconic character in gaming, Mario. “NST was working on Super Mario Maker for the 3DS, needed a ton of extra hands on it, and I had an eye for UI design,” Guerrero says. “From UI, I branched out little by little doing a bit of everything, like modeling and texturing, until I established myself there primarily as a concept artist.”

From 2016 through 2023, save for a brief six-month detour to Wizards of the Coast, Guerrero created character, prop, and environmental concept art for an impressive list of Nintendo titles, including Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, and Mario vs. Donkey Kong (2024).

Although he enjoyed his time at Nintendo, Guerrero decided he was open to something new after wrapping on Mario vs. Donkey Kong, ideally working on an original IP. By chance, an acquaintance of Guerrero’s, a fellow Mexican artist living in Paris who had recently finished work on Green Street Pictures’ debut series, the critically-acclaimed ecological sci-fi Scavenger’s Reign, reached out asking if he was interested in character design work on their new show Common Side Effects, co-produced by Mike Judge of King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head fame. Suddenly, Guerrero found himself back in the animation world.

“It was really cool to jump back into animation and really understand a story and characters,” Guerrero says. “You design things in a game so players can interact with them, but in animation you design for very specific moments. It’s just a very different medium to entertain, a lot more bespoke, and it really makes you do the best art you can in every single frame.”

Guerrero’s main role on the production was designing, coloring, and creating animation keyframes for over 20 incidental characters from nearly every episode of the series, populating Common Side Effects’ world with crowds and one-to-two shot characters. “Waiters, politicians, mobsters, horse racing fans, I did a bit of everything. There were also instances where certain characters might need a design change due to story moments. For example, they asked me for ideas on how one character might look after stepping on a land mine,” Guerrero laughs. “I’d go, ‘Okay, maybe this bone can stick out like this, and the guts can be like that.’”

Just as he’d hoped, working on an original IP led to lots of new artistic experiences for Guerrero, especially given executive producer Joe Bennett’s distinct visual aesthetic for the show. “The characters all have really big heads, but their face, hands and feet are really small,” Guerrero says. “I had never drawn with those proportions before and it was super fun! Something really special about this show to me is that even the incidental characters don’t feel like filler — they have lots of really interesting, different body shapes, nationalities, and cultural references, which adds so much to the richness of the world and environment that Joe and (executive co-producer) Benjy [Brooke] created.”

In addition to characters, Guerrero also served as a color designer, establishing the color keyframes for characters and scenes that animators would follow during production. One particularly vivid scene Guerrero color designed, starring the FBI agent Harrington, is his proudest achievement on the show. “Harrington goes to a rave where the light sources made it a very challenging color task,” Guerrero grins. “There’s a big crowd wearing flashy clothes and glow sticks. It was so crazy to color, I really enjoyed it!”

Guerrero’s dazzling rave scene, on top of the series’ gripping blend of political intrigue, comedy, and moments of surreal mysticism, has earned Common Side Effects rave reviews. It also left Guerrero ready for more. “I’d love to work with Green Street again in the future, they are such a creative, fun bunch of artists,” Guerrero says.

In the meantime, Guerrero has kept himself plenty busy. He set to work on concept art for the Disney Lorcana trading card game right after the show wrapped, and has since joined VR game studio Owlchemy Labs of Job Simulator fame as a lead concept artist, working on their new upcoming title Dimensional Double Shift. “I’ve been there a year now, and concept art for VR games has been really interesting,” he says. “Everything is interactable, so you have to be very mindful of the visual hierarchy and what things should stand out. It’s a really fun space, and there’s a lot of growth to be had there for me.”

Guerrero recently helped his fellow DigiPen Dragons with their own growth as well, returning to campus in 2024 for a student art portfolio review to provide professional feedback. “It was really fun!” he says. “I think DigiPen really pushes you to the limit. Just in terms of the skills I got there, it’s been really helpful,” Guerrero says. “The more you know about 3D and the pipeline, the more valuable you can be at a studio, even primarily as a concept artist like me!”