The production blog for the animated short film.
Hi everyone!
Sorry about the lack of postings lately. We’ve all been enjoying the holiday season!
We are going to be storyboarding soon, and we’ll post some art shortly.
Meanwhile, if you’re in a holiday mood, you can visit the Christmas Animation Festival. Its a free online festival showing some great holiday animation. Visit Larry Lauria’s blog at http://lanimate.animationblogspot.com.
Hello everyone!
I thought it was about time to check in with a progress report, and I’m gonna do it wearing my multiple hats like I did with the first post.
Producer
I think we’ve got a great foundation to move forward. We’ve recently set up a Huddle account for online meetings and communications about the film’s production (because our schedules keep us too busy to meet at the same time) and we’ve got a solid membership of our test audience on Facebook. I think that these tools are going to be very useful moving forward. We’re also moving forward in our fundraising efforts. We’re chugging along and we’ll keep you informed on how things go.
Director / Writer
We’re in the process of hammering out the treatment. Once everyone thinks that its working as a film, we’ll run it by our test audience, and yes, the test audience will contribute to the film’s production from beginning to end… which is kinda cool. Based on their input and suggestions, we will make any necessary revisions and then move forward with a script and storyboards. We won’t reveal much of that on this blog, but we will share snippets with everyone as we go forward.
Animator
We’ve gotten some mixed reactions from the teaser trailer. Some has been really good, and some has been really bad… but that’s okay, because in the book “The Art of the Start”, he says that we need to “catalyze passion” and apparently we are. Maybe it would help if we explained what you’re looking at…
That trailer was designed and animated with Macromedia Flash MX and edited with Windows Movie Maker on my little Sony Vaio laptop, with no Wacom products at all. It’s actual production (not including creating the animatic) lasted two weeks because we had to hit the deadline of Day in the Park (and the trailer was finished the night before the event). We didn’t have the full 2 weeks because of our day jobs, an emergency trip to the hospital and a birthday party. You’re looking at roughly 14-16 hours of work, from beginning creating the character rigs through to editing the thing together.
Now, imagine if we had a computer that could actually run Flash efficiently, a Cintiq, After Effects, Pro Tools and ample production time… and hopefully soon, you won’t have to. -L
Hello everyone! Just checking in with a quick update. We have launched a page for the film on Facebook here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=30209801589
We’re slowly and surely growing a test audience for the film. We’re looking for input from folks to see how our story is working, if the character design has the right appeal, etc. Feel free to join up!
Speaking of story, we’re starting our story meetings. Check back for some clips from the revised treatment and soon, the script!
Here it is… the first version of the film’s teaser trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC5q2E15C0k
This is the version that played at our promotional booth at Day in the Park in Lynchburg. Also, the secret is now out. Tony Rodgers, the acclaimed trailer voice artist that voiced the trailers for Shrek, Bee Movie, Madagascar 2 and Igor has voiced our trailer. Yeah, that’s really him.
As I am very proud of my first YouTube trailer, it doesn’t look quite as intended. The production value isn’t quite what I wanted, but when you’re animating in your free time from your day job and you have a few life events happen (including Mike’s grandmother having a diabetic adventure at the hospital and my grandpa’s 80th birthday) it kinda takes away from your production time. Still, this isn’t the final version and I wanted you guys to see what the kids saw at Day in the Park.
We will keep you updated!!!
What a complete SUCCESS! Our film’s promotional booth at Lynchburg’s Day in the Park was a SMASH HIT! I had NO IDEA how popular we would be. I’m so sorry everyone, but we didn’t have TIME to take pictures! I managed to snap one pic while we were setting up… there’s Mike behind the tent there. On the HUMONGOUS 42 inch flat screen we had (man, it was awesome) we showed the teaser trailer for the film and a bunch of cards on screen (yeah yeah, like I did in the ol’ CAS days) showing our web addresses and promotional stuff for the film, like educational “Fast Facts” and “Did you know?” stuff for the kids and parents to read as they were waiting in line. We trimmed it up a lot from what you see here, but when we were done, it looked very professional and very slick and got a TON of attention.
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The theme for Day in the Park this year was “It’s a Jungle out here”. Our booth was for “Jungle Face Paint”. I was handling the face paints… Mike also had some jungle animal stamps… kinda like fake tattoos for the ones scared of getting painted and impatient parents (he really helped me out by being the “Express Lane”). It was kinda slow in the beginning of the day… but once those kids started walking around showing off their faces… the line came.
No kidding… We had a line of kids from, say 10:30am STRAIGHT to 3pm. No slow down, no break. In the end, I had to cut it off and tell folks we were closed. One little girl cried and we hooked her up with a stamp tattoo. I’m thinking that everyone had they’re eye on the line and as it got short, they jumped in. We even had a few that tried to break in line and a few ghetto mamas that started yelling. It was ROCKIN. I kinda threw time constraints out the door (even though I thought it was pretty fast) and painted entire faces instead of just cheeks. I really think that’s what made them stand and wait in line, combined with having the TV to watch to pass the time.
Those kids requested a variety of animals to be. The most popular were tigers and jaguars. There were a few monkeys and butterflies. A couple little guys got war paint and some little football players got their team colors painted on them. I even had a few kids who wanted the Heath Ledger Joker face and one little guy who wanted to be Iron Man. I really wish I had taken some pictures… I was really proud of a few of those.
But the goal was to promote the film, and WE DID! We now have the beginnings of an email fan base from our signup sheets, we handed out a lot of brochures and scored some potential donors (we weren’t allowed to actively fundraise in the public park). I think everyone is liking the call for a TEST AUDIENCE. There were a lot of parents who liked the idea of their kids participating in making a cartoon. We were even approached by ANOTHER local museum that wanted to work out programming based on our film!! It was an AVALANCE of success for us. THANK YOU SO MUCH to EVERYONE who stopped by our promotional booth. I apologize for any wait and the hot weather, but I think everyone had a lot of fun.
We are DEFINATELY going to try and find another local event to promote the film. Maybe we can find a haunted house where we can face paint again. Oh, sounds like an idea!
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| Tom's Avatar |
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| Simon's Avatar |
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| Polly's Avatar |
Here are some of the avatars we plan on using for our IndieGoGo page and IndieGoGo widgets. The first one, Tom, is already up. These are the actual rigs that are being used in the fundraising trailer.
More art soon!
We have launched the prospectus for our film.
What’s a prospectus?
It’s an overview of our project for any potential investors or supporters to review our project.
At first, we wanted to post it on the film’s dotcom, but based on the response we got, we decided that was a bad idea. We will soon post instructions on how to obtain a copy of our prospectus.
We are rolling along on creating the fundraising teaser trailer for the film. I finished up the animatic for the trailer and passed it off to Mike last week for music. I’m almost done keying out the characters (arcs are our friends) and I’ll be doing the breakdowns (yay timing!) and inbetweening this weekend.
