I think I’m going to make an animated show

“Lol my right side did sleep on the pillow. I still look beautiful.” -Jason

July 23rd, 2017. I was in Santa Barbara for the weekend. I brought with me a sketchbook, and some various pencils and markers. I had spent the last several years really diving into photography, and I felt like getting back to my roots I think. Honestly I wasn’t sure if I had in me anymore, it had been so long since I had done much drawing… on actual paper. For whatever reason, this is where I started getting the idea of making a show. I had spent a lot of time making YouTube Videos with some of my friends, so perhaps I could make an animated show with them somehow. I ended up drawing Jason… and I’m not sure if his beard at the time was exaggerated at all… it does get quite large from time to time.

“ I’ve never understood why, even when you are praising the material and trying to show others how much you like it, you get hit with a copyright claim and all of your hard work is flushed down the toilet.”

There were two things I think that really drove me to pursue this project. Having spent countless hours working on various YouTube videos, only to have them struck down with ridiculous copyright claims was getting infuriating. I’ve never understood why, even when you are praising the material and trying to show others how much you like it, you get hit with a copyright claim and all of your hard work is flushed down the toilet. Reminded me of how the band KISS sued their own fans and I hated that about them. I had pretty much had it with YouTube at this point wasting hours upon hours of hard work. I felt that the only way to avoid it is to completely make everything in the video.. 100% original. Having experience in Photography, Video Editing, Music and Audio Production, Drawing, Painting, Design, Illustration, Sculpting… this seemed like an opportunity to put all of my skills together and do everything I know how to do. One thing I learned in Audio Engineering school that had stuck with me was “Take what you know, and apply it to what you don’t know”. I felt like I had this chance to really put everything I had into something to see how far I could take it. I knew I’d be learning new stuff along the way as well too.

It was around this time later in 2017 that I got a second generation iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. I had bought the app Procreate back in December of 2012, using some basic stylus with it. I was pretty anxious to put it to use. I wanted to use the iPad for this, and I was determined to find a way to do it.

“To me, the cartoon version of He-Man looked so simplified, nearly everything that made it cool in the concept art was missing.”

 I had watched a fun show on Netflix called “The Toys That Made Us.” Particularly the He-Man episode had really struck me. I remember seeing the concept artist show the amazing artwork he designed for he-man… it was awesome. And then to see what they ended up with for the cartoon really got me thinking… “Why’d they even bother hiring this guy?”. The cartoon did not look anywhere nearly as cool as the concept art. To me, the cartoon version of He-Man looked so simplified, nearly everything that made it cool in the concept art was missing. Seeing some of the animations right after seeing the concept art really contrasted how simple the He-Man cartoon was. There was no detail in anything, and very little art was used in the animation. For most scenes, maybe the mouth would move a bit, but everything else would stay the same. This really stuck in my head.

Having spent some time re-animating He-Man into a Music Video, It got me thinking… How hard can it be? At the time, If I had known how much work it really would be, I’m still not sure if I would have followed through or not… I may have. I did know it would be a lot of work, but I think what I did not take into account for at the time was my knack for overdoing things a bit, and the age-old artist’s curse of perfectionism to top it off.

“For a long time, Adult Swim became to us what a record deal would be for a garage band.”

I started talking to the gang about the idea, and everyone seemed interested. I let everyone know it would take a very long for me to make anything… probably a year for all I could predict. We got to work tossing around Ideas. I wanted to make sure it had some elements of Sci-Fi, but with the random style of comedy that would make it fit onto Adult Swim. For a long time, Adult Swim became to us what a record deal would be for a garage band. We would have to get noticed first, and to get noticed, it would have to exist in the first place.

The Action Time Action Unit manual.

Taking from the discussions with my “It’s Action Time!!!” friends, I wrote up an Action Time Action Unit bible of sorts. I whipped up just under 70 pages describing characters, places, Actiondyne Industries… basically trying to describe an entire IP. I felt it would help serve as a baseline to keep everyone on the same page. As we all started getting into it, some of our ideas were starting to stray and contradict so I think it helped serve as a creative anchor… and would add to it as we went along, although I was not updating it as much as I should have been. So we had a good start to the project. But there was a lot more to do from here.

I had spent a lot of time working on Logos, Fonts, and working out how the overall workflow was going to go while Sean started writing up a bunch of scripts we could possibly use. Things were starting to take shape, and it was exciting.