A while back I mentioned that I was unsatisfied with how the cartoon I worked on turned out, and I thought I'd do a series of posts analyzing why. There are a lot of areas that fell short, but I think the best place to start is to briefly describe the goals and the process.
The Goals
The first and foremost idea I had with this cartoon was to introduce the characters to a larger audience. From my own experience I know most people don't usually read comics that are more than a page long, so I thought animation would be a good way to tell longer stories and keep peoples attention. This sounds like a good idea, and I'm definitely going to focus on animating from now on. But the story here is still lacking.
The second idea was to take the characters that I'd been drawing for years and see if I could animate them. Looking at the video, I guess the answer's technically yes, but that's not really saying much considering the thought process that went into it.
The third idea was to figure out how to work on a collaborative project. Almost everything I'd done up to that point was strictly done by myself, and I'd never had to explain anything or even analyze it. So this was a first and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
The Process
The first thing I did was make a rough comic of the story. That took about a week, and it shouldn't have even taken that long. After that I got together with Justin and we recorded the voices. I did all the main voices while Justin voiced the cop. After the voices were recorded I made time sheets, where I would see where every syllable landed for every fifteenth of a second.
Once the time sheets were done, the long process of animating began. It started out where I would do the key frames (or the main drawings), and Justin would do the inbetweens. This took about two or three months. After the drawings were done I scanned each and every one of them and Justin and I inked them on Photoshop. This took even longer than the actual drawings, at several months.
We'd save the inked drawings as JPEGs, and then I assembled them with the audio clips onto Windows Movie Maker (which I DO NOT recommend using).
Alright that's enough background crap. Over the next few posts I'll talk about each of the different parts of the cartoon such as: The Story and Characters, The Drawings, The Animation, The Thought Process, The Direction and anything else I can think of. Now before I go on, I want to address what everyone else saw as the most glaring issue: Yes, I know the audio's fucked up. But that's an easy fix (not that I'll fix it now) and I don't think it's the biggest issue. I get that people get annoyed by that, but I don't get why people can tolerate shitty visuals, but bad audio might as well be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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