original animated series
Challenge
This was a passion project of mine. I wanted to create an animated show centered around a reptilian alien who accidentally creates life on earth. I partnered with some close friends to help write and voice act. We wrote 10 episodes, created a pitch deck and animated the first 12 minutes of the pilot.
Creative direction
Writing
Branding
Logo design
Illustration
Character design
Animation
Audio production
Voice acting main character
Voice directing
Social media content
my role
After months of table reads and creative writing sessions we had written enough scripts to begin producing the pilot episode. I began with some preliminary sketches, experimenting with various character designs and key background art for scene 1.
CHARACTER DESIGN
The setup for scene 1 was straight forward so I skipped storyboards to save time, but scene 2 needed a montage to show the evolution of microbial life on Earth, so I put together an extensive storyboards consisting of over
50 frames.
STORYBOARDS
It took about 3 years to produce 12 minutes of animation from first sketches to final render, plus the voice acting and audio production. I refined the characters as I went along and put everything together in a pitch deck that goes through the shows premise, character profiles and episode outlines.
PITCH DECK
Right about the time I finished animating the first 3 scenes of the pilot, NFT’s and “Web 3” had hit the scene in a big way and I was sucked into the ecosystem. I met the owner of a new streaming service who was partnering with NFT projects to make content for his network. I sent him the pitch deck and we had a few meetings discussing a plan to create an NFT project in order to raise money to pay an animation studio to develop the series for his network.
So I developed an NFT “PFP” project of the main character Tod. Much like the famous “Bored Apes” This was to be a collection of 10,000 unique profile pictures with varying levels of rarity depending on the attributes the picture contained. These were all the rage at the time.
As fate would have it, right about the time I had finished the art for the project the whole NFT market had collapsed, the CEO ghosted me and I was left with all this art work and a bad case of burn out.
FUNDRAISING
Having fun writing scripts with friends is one thing, trying to animate a whole series by yourself is another. Dreams of being the next Rick and Morty clouded my judgement of what is feasible. My ambition and hubris got the better of me and I got way in over my head not realizing the amount of work it actually takes to accomplish such a goal.
I realized the proper shape for this project was a graphic novel. We had all these scripts and characters that we loved and they dont have to be animated. The first step to animation is storyboarding and a graphic novel is essentially a giant storyboard. Jumping straight into animation was putting the cart before the horse. So thats what I’m doing now and its much more enjoyable.
Feeling exahsted and depressed I stepped away from it all. My life and all my hopes and dreams had been consumed with this project and I needed to recenter, so I took a year and directed my creative energy towards a music project just for fun, in order to keep my mind off of it. I came to some realizations:
I bit off more than I can chew
The stars in my eyes distracted me from what was important.
I put the cart before the horse.
