What The Hell Is Wrong With The Pancakes Cartoon: Collaboration

A weird-ass inbetween that's only on the screen for 1/15th of a second

     The main reason this cartoon even got made at all was because Justin saw some of my cartoons, and really wanted to work on one together. I honestly don't know if I would have embarked on such a large project by myself at the time, if I didn't have someone else who shared the same interests. And I couldn't have picked a better guy to work since he was able to stick on the whole project.
     Now the story and the storyboards were all done by me. I did all the main voices, while Justin did the cop. And the process we had was a simple one. I would draw the key frames, all the main poses. Every time a character comes to a stop, that's my drawing. I would write little numbers on the corner of the page, and then I would hand my drawings over to Justin and he'd do the inbetweens. During the movements, those were Justin's drawings. Towards the end, I started doing more inbetweens. I'd do every other drawing in the talking sequences, since I had to time the consonants and Justin would do the vowels. After the first scene or two, Justin started inking the drawings. While he was doing the inking, I animated the entire fourth scene. After a few months went by, and he was still on the first scene, I started inking, and we each inked every other scene.

Another weird inbetween. But it moves smooth.

     Looking back, I'm glad we collaborated on it because otherwise, I'd still be working on it, or I would've given up. Collaboration has been a part of animation throughout most of it's history, and mainly for practical reasons. I read somewhere that Disney's Snow White would have taken a single person 200 years to make. Now, I don't know where they got their numbers and I can't remember the source, but I'm inclined to believe it. There's a lot that goes into a cartoon, and having other people to work with cuts down on the time and it can let different ideas and viewpoints into the finished product of you let it. I wish I had.
     I've always seen Justin as a better artist than myself. I can tell he has different influences than I do, and a larger variety of them. He draws more from anime and realism, which isn't my area of interest, but he does it well. He has a good understanding of perspective, space, and solidity.

More detailed than I like, but well done. The smaller forms are part of the larger forms.

      So as you can see, he knows his stuff. Too bad you can't tell it in the finished cartoon though. His inbetweens did their job of connecting the poses, but a lot of the drawings feel awkward and lumpy. While they theoretically make sense, as they move the different shapes to the next shapes, the drawings themselves just look off. If only I'd constructed the characters instead of making half-ass designs. Still, I can tell in some of the drawings that he was really pushing to make the awkward designs more three-dimensional and balanced.

Justin adds some form and solidity to a sloppy, mushy cartoon

      Really, the whole process that we had was faulty. Instead of one person doing the key frames, and one person doing the inbetweens, we should have switched back and forth, or done both posing AND animating. Justin could have done some key frames that I could inbetween, and he could have animated animated his own sequences to go alongside mine (although, he'd probably surpass them, cuz, like I said, he knows his stuff).
     The main problem, though, was that I gave him NO DIRECTION. I'd just hand him my key frames and let him have at it. Every once in a while I'd explain something, but for the most part I didn't let him know what I wanted. And that's because I didn't know what I wanted. So I can't complain about how any of this turned out. That's why I've been doing these animation studies, and I want to make a few real short animations before we work on another project, to get myself up to speed. We have a lot more ideas, and next time, we'll do one of his.