Animation - work in progress

Here is more of a sequence between Jim and Wayne. It is still a work in progress.

Theme Song Phase One

I wrote this song a while back and recorded this rough version, but I could never think of lyrics, so it sat on my hard drive for ever. I heard again while looking for inspiration for the theme for the cartoon. I like it, but I may rerecord it at a higher tempo.

Here is a little taste of Wayne. This is an animation work-in-progress.

Up to speed.

Well, I'm sure I left some stuff out along the way, but we are pretty much caught up to where the show is now. I am currently animating the first webisode. Its looking good so far. I am going to post updates and animations here regularly.

New Jim test render.

This is a re-rendered version of the previous Jim test. Oh boy, how I love it!

Style change.

After months of looking at the cel-shaded look, I decided it had to change. It was too much on the eyes and I didn't like the way the solid black lines rendered. This is the current style for Tested on Animals.

Re-recording

Nate and I recorded and re-recorded hours and hours of voice overs to make sure it was funny. After hearing and speaking the same lines over and over we were starting to forget what was funny to us in the begining. So, we decided to just do a two and a half minute short as a first webisode. Keep it short and funny. We recorded the VO and I spent a few evenings editing it.

Early Jim render.

This is a render of Jim in the old cel-shaded style.

Into full gear

So, I needed help with some story ideas and voices. I called my friend Nate, who was very excited at the thought of being a part of a cartoon. He and I got together and wrote some stories involving our three loveable roomies. We came up with some funny and disturbing stuff. At some point I would like to post some of our early scripts and ideas. We wanted to get used to doing the voice overs, so Nate and I went in together on some digital recording equipment . We purchased the Tascam US-122L package. It had everything we needed. So we started recording.

The original style.

I originally thought that a cel-shaded look would fit these guys better because I wanted it to be very cartoony. Here are some of the first stills.

Catch up to speed.

So, the purpose of this blog is to show the progress of my cartoon. However, I have actually been working on it for a while so I need to catch this blog up to the present. I needed a good brain storming partner to get this thing going, so I called my buddy Willy. He came over to my house and for some inspiration he grabbed a beer and I a glass of wine. When things started to get silly the ideas started pouring out. We didn't limit ourselves in any way and that led to some bizarre stuff. We came up with the premise for a show about three room mates. A chimp named Wayne, who was raised in a lab where tests were done that excelerated his brain capacity. When he could think, speak and act like the scientists (even performing his own tests), he filed for emancipation from his scientist guardians and took with him his own pet experiment: Rat, a rat the size of a human child, with about the same mental capabilities. Wayne's own tests on Rat's growth hormones made him that size, but his efforts on Rat's brain weren't as successful as the scientist's on his own. The two of them rented a duplex and put an ad in the paper for a 3rd room mate to save on bills. This ad was answered by Jim, a student at the local community college.

The idea!

So, I guess I should start with how this little project came about. For as long as I can remember I have been drawing characters for my own comics and cartoon ideas. I always dreamed that one day I would be able to animate on my own show. When I was 14 or so I saw Family Guy for the first time. The show didn't change my life or anything back then, but one thing about the show did strike a chord in me. I heard that the guy who created the show (Seth Macfarlane) was only 23 years old!! I remember hearing that and thinking, man how awesome would that be to make people laugh with my own cartoon in 10 years? That little spark had lit a fire in me. Well over the years I saw so many peers of mine with more talent than I had and it made me question if I should even continue with art at all. I took a couple years off from art until highschool, where the passion for it came back, but I had forgotten all about my goal of making a cartoon by age 23. Well, here I am all growed up now. I have been animating professionally for 3 years in the video game industry. Back in February (07) I was surfing IMDB.com and came across Macfarlane's page. I read there about how he was only 23 when he started Family Guy and it all came back. I looked at the calendar and realized I had only a few months til my 23rd birthday and I was no where near having my own show! I didn't even have the slightest connection to a company I could pitch an idea to. Then I thought about all the self-published web cartoons I had seen over the years. A lot of them were crudly drawn flash animations, but were funny enough to get people laughing and to gain a little following. I thought there was no reason why I couldn't start a web cartoon that I did in 3d. I had been doing it for years and had become pretty fast at it. I could even model all my own characters and sets. This realization set it off for me and I have been plugging away at it since. I am 23 now and I will be 24 in June 08. So, I need to get cracking to get my cartoon published on my website and so far I am well on the way.