I gave up on animation a long time ago.
Never completely, but it stopped being the dream. I attribute (or blame) that original dream down to the Jurassic Bark episode of Futurama, where Fry reunited with his mummified dog Seymour (you know the one, you know the ending) - it was then I realised the emotional impact animation could have and always wanted to make a series of my own. Along with my childhood obsession of drawing Daffy Duck and the obsessive routine-watching of Cheez TV after the aerobics - it all eventually came to an end. Not because I grew out of it - it just faded away, alas, alas.
But as a professional working video editor for 10+ years, animation never completely went away - being heavily steeped in After Effects workflows it turned more into motion graphics and compositing. My mid-20s-crisis (oh boy) move to Europe brought back the inkling - I made a super simple animated music video - mostly relying on a witty text monologue, and then after returning to Melbourne just in time for COVID I managed to make a couple more small animations - one actually made it into MIAF (Melbourne International Animation Festival). All these animations where done in After Effects, I still like them alot, but they’re a far cry from the traditional animation styles I hoped to be working in as a lad.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I figured it out, but one of the main instigators was while listening the podcast “Get Played” in early 2024 - where the hosts talked to writer Ashley Esqueda who had recently written an art book for the video game “Psychonauts 2”. She candidly talked about her experience as a writer with ADHD, when it occurred to me.
And so, a few months later in mid-2024, just as my own official diagnosis was prescribed, my good friend Carl sent me a link for a residency application between Ludo (Brisbane animation studio behind Bluey) and ACMI X (Co-working space based in Melbourne), and surely enough I followed through with it.
And thus ‘brains’ was first created! (Sorry for the long journey!)And surely enough I didn’t get the residency - but I got two great contacts from Ludo out of it who wanted to help me on the journey anyway. Shout out to the team Bambini, who got the residency! (Great bunch, friends of a friend, who’da thought!)
At the point of applying for the residency, I had created a basic bible, and had written a pilot episode. The idea centred around two kids Miles and Cam and their two anthropomorphic brains who leave their heads and go on self-aware, whacky but often mundane adventures. I wanted to create something simple to animate but with a bounce and stretchiness of old Chuck Jones animations to it.
I had cast the two brains in my head from the get go. Both podcastsTotal Reboot and the “Finding” series have been some of my favourites over the last few years, and the hosts Alexei Toliopolous and Cameron James, seemed like they’d be the perfect fit to get some inspiration from. Actually I believe an inkling came after seeing Cameron James do his solo show at the MICF - as well as it being a great show, he had some kind of aside regarding ADHD, which I still don’t know if he was just using it as a shorthand or not!
So a couple months after I had lost the residency, ‘brains’ all felt a bit stagnant. I had considered turning it into a children’s book - but after I lined up a coffee with my contacts at Ludo when they were down in Melbourne during MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) - I decided to take some time off work to keep working on it. Or maybe, I just took 2 weeks off work to watch a few dozen films at MIFF… but by the end of it I had a script and super rough animatic for a pitch teaser video.
And by chance, at the very last screening of MIFF, for the film “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” who did I run into but Alexei Toliopoulos! My desired voice actor for Miles’ Brain. We had a lovely chat, both delirious after many films - we talked about the screening we both enjoyed and I pitched my little animated series and got his contact details.
After what felt like a string of heralded victories, was a few months of very slow communication. I moved on to developing some other script ideas, while also getting bogged down by regular editing work. The malaise of day to day existence really began to creep back in, as it often does.
But thankfully, I eventually got some actionable feedback for the initial rough animatic, and in December, just before Christmas managed to line up a VO recording in Sydney with Alexei and Cameron, who were both decidedly on board! After rushing some last minute rewrites, I flew over to Sydney for the session and managed to book sone time in a a great little recording studio (Kiln Studios) While it was a great session - it all had to be kept short (due to one of the actors almost losing their voice before a string of shows!) But they both killed it, and I had a great time meeting and directing them both.
One of my own failings from this session, was not really communicating properly (really to myself, let alone the actors) the difference between the vocal performance of the children characters and their brains. I’d always envisaged these to be done by seperate actors (using actual children or a Nancy Cartwright-type for the children’s human forms) but for the sake of this teaser, which I was only intending to produce as a rough animatic with an unfinished soundtrack, I thought it would be simpler just to have Alexei and Cam also doing the voices. Quickly after the session I realised the voices needed to be more distinctly different performers to make their brains voices really stand out, something I already knew - but it ironically meant, that I didn’t push some of the ‘brains' performances in enough of a higher, childlike register - which was sensibly being reserved for the children’s dialogue. That all being said, I’m super happy with the performances and they only keep growing on me as I’ve edited it all together.
Part of that failing too was, for the sake of exposition I had given the kids too much dialogue in the initial teaser script. So once I had the voice over recordings and at back at my desk in January (after being tragically addicted to the video game Persona 5) I rewrote a bunch of the script, finding creative ways to give the dialogue over to the brains. It’s all a big puzzle finding ways to weave in and out of the brain and children’s dialogue - particularly for this teaser which by its nature is largely expository. I ended up for this pitch video leaving Miles’ few lines in there with a digitally pitched up Alexei, while due to script changes I rerecorded Cam’s lines myself (blargh) - though I’m still deciding whether to hire actual children to rerecord these lines at this early stage.
After spending a couple weeks editing, rewriting and rethumbnailing, I spent what ended up being about 3 weeks redrawing the whole animatic within Toon Boom Harmony. This was the first real project I’ve done within Harmony, and I’m absolutely loving it. While there are many things I can do in seconds in After Effects that have been taking me a while to figure out in Toon Boom, there’s so many intuitive features I would’ve dreamed of as a kid animating in Macromedia Flash in my High School library back in the late ‘00s. I’m looking forward to doing my first fully animated short with the software still - hopefully something for a Loopdeloop screening in the coming months.
And thus this journey’s led us here - to the very start. Here’s to all our endless beginnings. I’ve got a version of the teaser animatic I’m happy with and am now starting to pitch it around for development. And as I’ve learnt, animation takes time and patience, something I’ve long not quite had the aptitude for - until now… maybe? Who’s to say.
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