So, ladies and gents, I’d like to introduce you to a new ‘Bru & Boegie’ short. It is a nice thing I made, along with some help from some friends.
I wrote a fair bit about the process in the post prior to this, but if you didn’t read that, here’s a brief run-down on the practical process:
Spent some time in Prince Albert (a small town in the desert in South Africa) earlier this year writing the outline, kept whittling down the couple pages until it was a single page outline, and until it just ‘felt right’. Then, with that I wrote a proper script with proper formatting in Final Draft 10 – that part was pretty easy as I’d figured out most of what happened in the outline. I tweaked that a bit. Then, recorded the voices in my home studio using an AKG D5 mic with a pop-screen into my external Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 sound card. I got the script up on FD Reader app on an iPad, which made it easier to highlight voices for the voice artists to find the lines and record. I selected voice takes and edited the voice tracks in Logic Pro X. Once the timings were working how I imagine they would in animation, I exported a single WAV for use in the next stage – Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 5.5, where I created the storyboard and animatic in about a week, then I imported the animatic into Toon Boom Harmony Premium 14 for animating; animation lasted about 9 or 10 days. The time it took to do the animation surprised even me. Because I had a tight outline, I could be pretty loose with the animation, and did. I’m more au fait with Toon Boom Harmony now and that makes it a lot easier to express myself without getting too caught up in the technical side of things. I also have a 27″ Wacom Cintiq HD that lets me draw pretty fast. Toon Boom also has a neat integration thing where each sequence from Toon Boom Storyboard gets converted into a new Toon Boom Harmony file with relevant audio and animatic, ready for animating. So, that’s another time-saver. In any event, I’m pleased to have completed this before leaving for Japan. KIFF.
So, I’m pleased with how this process worked. I had a bunch of new software I bought and it all made life easier, faster and more efficient for me.
The reason for creating such a thing? Well, firstly, Bru & Boegie are my home-dolla-boiz and I’ll most likely puntin’ them until the day I die. Yikes. Secondly, I use them as a vehicle to communicate stuff I may be thinking, they’re my very own project and because I’ve been making Bru & Boegie stuff since 2002, they feel pretty real to me and I love them. It felt time to create something of my own, without showing to anyone for approval, without getting notes, without all the stuff that slows down and waters down the process of making something truly original.
Also, I guess I do wonder about people that complain so much. Either do something about it, or stop complaining. Some people do actually put energy into action. But, there seem to be so many people complaining about Donald Trump. I’m in South Africa and this dude is infiltrating the news like a virus that’s spread quickly. He’s halfway around the world and I see stuff about him on my news feed, friends are talking about him – at least there’s Bru & Boegie to sort this out. Bru & Boegie are everyday dudes who don’t second-guess themselves too much. They get stuff done without any fanfare. They just do it. My heroes.
I know I keep harping on about this, but man, I really prefer this kind of thing to something overly-produced. Same with music – give me a singer who sings with soul, who wrote the song him / herself with a tape recorder, over a team that wrote a song, who kept reworking it and reworking it until it’s lost its meaning – although technically great, that soul can get produced out of it.
A bit about the people who worked on this!
Arnie Rodriguez (California, USA)
I met Arnie at the Annecy Animation Festival in 2013. I was sitting by myself in a park, eating some lunch. Probably bread and cheese and ham, and a banana. Arnie and his friend Holi came along and started chatting to me. They were friendly. Arnie did a backflip from a jungle-gym and Holi balanced so well on the snake thing in the park, I was impressed. They were both so fit. I showed them one of my Goldfish music videos and they thought it was cool. Anyways, Arnie once created a score for my Bobo short that an orchestra played live I think at ‘Animated Eden’, an animation festival in Cumbria, UK, that Holi organized. I saw him briefly again at Annecy 2 years ago, we’ve kept in touch, and would you know it, we got a chance to work in this short together! So stoked. He’s made amazing 8-bitty-crunchy music, he studied at the ‘San Francisco Conservatory of Music’ and is a super musician and seems to go on amazing journeys into jungles and plays music with the native tribes. I didn’t give Arnie any brief at all, just said ‘do what you want’ and he came through so kiffly for this.
Olubunmi John (Lagos, Nigeria)
I’ve never met Olubunmi John in real life, but we met online. He did some ‘fan art’ for Bru & Boegie and Moosebox and I was like ‘this is rad’. I hired him to do some backgrounds for my previous Bru & Boegie – ‘Feelin’ It’ short and he did a killer job without much direction from me. I then got him to do backgrounds of a new Goldfish video (which hasn’t been released yet) and again he did a great job. So, when the time came to do this new short, I decided to once again call upon the talents of John. All I did was give him a rough greyscale sketch of each background with notes on what I wanted separate layers for, and he did the rest. NICE.
Ben Badenhorst (Plettenberg Bay, South Africa)
Ben and I have played music together in various music setups. Ben is an amazing musician; he plays guitar, bass, drums, sings and more – a music aficionado. I play drums and we once went on tour to support a singer-songwriter female, and we were touring with another female singer-songwriter who had her own supporting band. The two singer-songwriters fought a bit, but we had some fun. Ben also does amazing voices and I hired him to do some voices in here, which he nailed. I’m a particular fan of his Zulu accent, and he managed to emulate Nimrod from eTV aka Mr. “CRASH BOOM BANG” amazingly well.
Amanda: my lovely and beautiful girlfriend who I harangued into doing the Mom’s voice, hah. Nice.
Everyone was paid – because it’s a personal project the budgets aren’t big, and I’m pleased to have had friends work on this.
Anyways, I hope you liked the short, I plan to make more Bru & Boegie short (I actually have like 7 new episodes’ voices recorded waiting in the wings), I made an ancient vow to Bru & Boegie back in 2002 I’d see them through thick and thin, and they gel with me more and more.
Thanks guys, please keep well, eat a piece of cheese for me, and keep on being cool.
As a side, this pixel vid I made is about to hit 1 million views (on 998,967 at current view count):