Guys, I started this post weeks ago and never finished it, so, here it is, as is. I figure lemme rather get this out and keep things ticking along. What I’ll say is – Moosebox is looking flippen’ amazing 🙂 Everyone’s been doing really fantastic work to make this thing as awesome as we all know it can be. Really, can’t wait to share once it’s done 🙂 S’gonna be GREEEAAAT!
Hello dear my best dear best of friends and strangers. Today is an unusual day, in that I find myself with a bit of time on my hands to ponder the universe and do a thing or two, like make a new post on my site, perhaps read a bit more of my book and then doodle some new ideas for shows. What a blessing.
It has been a busy time, but I’ve found great relief from someone who’s agreed to take on a job that threatened my sanity, and then for other work, everyone seems to be doing what they’re doing best for Moosebox which is fantastic. We talked about Moosebox during CTIAF (Cape Town International Animation Festival) to a pretty full house, and that went down really well.
I recorded the audio for the talk, which you can hear here (Edit: I haven’t uploaded it yet). Not quite the same without the visuals, but still pretty interesting?
Thereafter I went to Joburg to meet with Alexi Wheeler at Mind’s Eye Creative, the animation studio that’s producing and animating the series. It was super cool having Alexi there where the show’s being animated.
While I was there I got some time to get to know the MEC crew a bit better, to chat with Ryan the designer and Steve the animation director, as well as spending time with Jen and Nick that run the show and other stuff. Was a great, productive, time. Would have dug to go to MEC’s 7th birthday braai, but alas, I was knackered by the end of the week and spent much of the day horizontal.
Also, we went to The Animation School in Joburg to deliver another Moosebox talk. We had 2 hours this time and could afford to really get into it, and *still* were rushed for time. So, we could easily do a 3 hour indulgent talk on Moosebox 🙂
At the moment, we’re busy doing music and sfx for Moosebox with ‘Audio Militia’ in Johannesburg.
That’s the post, folks!
Bonus: kiff little featurette here where I say a few supportive things about everything and Moosebox gets some lurvin’. Nice:
Friends. Am still alive. It has been a long time since I made a post. Why? Mostly because my attention has been razor-focused on an awesome project – MOOSEBOX. Awww Yisss Boiii.
Earlier last year, Nickelodeon greenlit 20 short webisodes of Moosebox (ha!), and I couldn’t be more stoked. Seriously. I partnered with writing-machine-and-likeminded Greig Cameron to go through the 60+ existing Moosebox story ideas and, like a game show, we whittled them down to a final list of 20 (with some new stories thrown in to the mix) by a process of elimination. I went to Cape Town to spend time with Greig, and we got through a surprisingly large amount of stories in the time we spent together, mostly making each other lol until tears, and then figuring out a basic three-story structure for the eps. Greig is the head writer at Supa Strikaz and I think probably has the most experience in South Africa for writing for kids aged around 6-12. (Supa Strikaz is on its 5th season, it shows on eTV and Disney XD in various territories.)
Mind’s Eye Creative are handling full-service production and animation! Mind’s Eye is a fully-fledged 2D studio in Johannesburg, having done rad work on ‘F is for Family’ on Netflix, other awesome International service work and super homegrown projects including a trailer for Rudolph Boonzaaier’s pilot ‘The Last Library‘ (that really impressed me). They’ve been offering a heap of great support, are extremely capable, have awesome and talented peeps working there in their 2D pipeline, and we all want to make this the best series we can 🙂
We contacted local scriptwriters we knew and had (sometimes) worked with before, we tweaked scripts as necessary and then contacted local board artists who we knew and whose work we liked and got through 20 episodes! Animatics are juuust about signed off (they’re amazing) and each is unique and entertaining. We’ve managed to hit that sweet videogame vibe while still keeping Moose and Catbox’s best friendship at the core, and I think they’re all just shining gems.
Voices are being recorded in New York (today!) and I just can’t wait for you guys to see what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. I’ve been working on this almost full-time from about mid-July last year, aaand it’s building up to be a cracker.
I unearthed the first time I told my buddy Keegan about Moosebox in an email in June 2013, as well as some veeery early sketches I attached to the email, some of them I showed Alexi Wheeler from Nickelodeon at Annecy in France in 2013. Moosebox has come a long ways since, it’s looking great 🙂 Huge thanks to Alexi and other key people at Nickelodeon for running with thisS.
BRU & BOEGIE
Guys. I have failed in my plans to finish this Bru & Boegie episode by the end of 2017. It’s in various states on completion, but once I got going with Moosebox it took a backseat. I’ve chipped away at it in little bits, but it feels like a cake that’s waiting for me to eat it. EAT IS I SHALL BRU & BOEGIE – EAT IT I SHALL.
I put a lot of myself into these personal projects and it helps me try out new techniques and experiment with stuff that later feeds into my commercial work, and with wanting to keep up my Youtube channel, this is a good avenue for it.
I have a number of other episodes recorded, including one written by Greig with voice-over from a friend who used to do the voice-over adverts on eTV. Dayeem, they’re just sitting in states on inertia, but I’ve really been focusing on doing the best jobs I can for all the paying work I get, kind of a ‘Love the one you’re with’ thing, so – sorry Bru & Boegie. I love you. I’m coming back for you. But guys – MOOSEBOX!!! It’s gonna be great. But also I love you Bru & Boegie. Kisses.
A guy called Thabang Gabela is opening a new comics shop called ‘Comic Edge SA‘, and he bought 20 of my Bru & Boegie comic books to sell, so, that’s nice 🙂
MUSIC
Bro’s. Our 10-year old band that went defunct has restarted, it’s called WILDFINGER, we had a gig recently and recorded it, as well as a jam session, which you can hear HERE:
I’ve now got a house, and I made one room a drum room, and I’ve been setting it up to make cool tjoons and am in the process of making it more soundproof to keep happy neighbourly relations.
The show I made with Triggerfish and Disney as part of the StoryLab is no longer with Disney, but is being shopped around in North America by a Canadian company. Hopefully they get a nice l’il nibble yum yum.
OTHER PROJECTS
DA BES BAND
As part of a ‘pressure release valve’ (and to try new techniques) I put this little animatic together whilst doing Moosebox animatics:
MTV
Here’s that short James Wolfaardt and I did for Cartuna and MTV:
GIPHY
Once again James Wolfaardt and I worked with Cartuna to bring you these animated GIFs for GIPHY that you can post on your Instagram stories by hitting the GIF button and searching for ‘Cartuna’. Kiff:
Smile
Shrug
Whatever Man
Mind Blown
PERSONAL
Being able to work in animation brings a lot of energy and colour to my life. So, that’s a nice thing to have (I think). I am grateful, and thanks for visiting my site fren.
Here’s me and my boet and Duncs at my brother’s 30th birthday party this last weekend in Yzerfontein. Kiff.
Friends! Howzit. What a time it has been, what a time since I last wrote, to shoot my digital words into the vast imagined space of ‘The Internet’.
What do I bring you this time? Well, lemme tell you a story. TLDR: a Beatboxing Dave short that was largely made by other people.
Last year I finished the first leg of development on a kids show. I was tired after it and decided it was time to do something purely for fun. ‘Play’ – a task that kids do effortlessly but something that’s sometimes noticeably missing from some types of commercial work.
So, I financed a few ‘play’ shorts – one of them was the ‘Bru & Boegie vs. Trump‘ short I wrote while on holiday, the result I’m proud of. Another was this Beatboxing Dave short, which I decided to hire mostly other people to make. I wanted to be the change in the world, and give someone the kind of brief I’d like. I really wanted everyone who worked on this to feel like they could – and should – just do whatever they wanted to do. I was saying ‘this is the budget, whatever you give back to me, I’m gonna accept and make. I trust you to do your thing, and please, enjoy your process.’
My buddy James Wolfaardt had been mentioning that he’d dig to write a Beatboxing Dave short, or at least encouraging me to do another BBD. He used to be a copywriter in Joburg for an ad agency, and is generally a very creative dude. So, I commissioned him to write an new episode of Beatboxing Dave and design the new characters, with the caveat that he can do whatever he wants and I’ll get it made.
We had a few discussions about story and then I left James to do his thing. Soon we had a cool script.
It was then time to record voices. We went to BASE Studios in Plettenberg Bay – a little recording studio tucked away in a coffee shop on the main street, run by the coffee shop owner. I commissioned fellow friend and musician Ben Badenhorst to do some voices (he does a really funny Cowbell Cow and Drum Circle Craig voice), and James and I did the other voices. We recorded, Ben and I brought along some instruments to record the drum circle session that happens in the story. Once that was done, things sat in inertia for a while until the little voice of ‘you need to finish your projects that your start, Mike’ came knocking.
Next step was to find someone to sort through all the recordings and pick and choose voice selections to make a voice track according to the script – no mean feat, as we did a couple read-through recordings. I listened to them and I think it was the first read-through that I thought was best (the first take’s often the best). I found Garth Jacobs through the Internet. He’d messaged me on Facebook, said he’s a recent graduate from SAE in sound engineering, and he’d ben keen to do some sound-to-animation stuff with me. Thinking this may be a perfect opportunity to work together, Garth readily took on the job, and did great work. A few suggestions here and there and soon we had a fixed voice track. He offered to work for free but I insisted on a nominal amount.
With that done, next was to find someone to board and animate it. I was originally going to take this on myself and get super experimental, but with other work brewing and a fair bit going on with house-stuff, I thought best thing would be to entrust this to someone else. I put the word out there and Nick Welch, 1st year lecturer at ‘The Animation School’ in Cape Town, agreed to do the job. My budget wasn’t big by any stretch of the imagination – and this is a couple minutes of animation – so I’m lucky and pleased that Nick agreed to it 🙂
He did boards and an animatic first, which were great and I didn’t have any changes – again insisted that he could do whatever he wanted. Nick pulled Benito Kok, 3rd year lecturer at ‘The Animation School’, into the fold to help with animating, and then brought Luke Viljoen in to do backgrounds. I got emailed tests every now and then, it was really encouraging to see that things were still ticking over for Beatboxing Dave.
It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
– Confucius
Before we knew it, the piece was animated!
I could then ask my buddy Arnie Rodrigues in California if he’d consider doing music & sfx for the short, again, with the caveat that I’d encourage him to go as experimental as he’d like – I would love to take whatever he can give me 🙂 Again, the budget I was offering him was small, and I’m thankful Arnie agreed to it. He’s a talented musician and has done music for a couple of my shorts before – once he even created an orchestral score and had it played live to my Bobo short – super kiff. Arnie sent through bits and pieces, and as usual, I felt like I needn’t really give much input as the short was in good hands. One or two suggestions once the finished track was sent through, and then, the music was done.
Arnie’s a Youtube vlogger, and his channel is fairly new. He’s such a cool dude I just had to post his latest video here (this is the latest at the time of writing):
I got the separate audio stems from Arnie and forwarded them to Garth, who was handling final mixing and mastering. Garth added a few more foley sounds and locked down the final mix. My plan was to have the short ready to show people at the meetings I had set up at ‘Ottawa Animation Festival’ in Canada but time was so tight and my energy so little that I didn’t get to create the title card and credits before the festival, so I left it until I got back to South Africa. I feel like I made up for not having the actual shot by doing some improv Beatboxing Dave voices at some of the meetings. Luckily, it’s a really easy pitch: ‘There’s a guy who Beatboxes badly, but he always manages to save Princess Lollipop from the lecherous clutches of Passive-Aggressive Steve who thinks Dave has the SIKKEST beatboxing skillz ever, bfff ksssh.
So – I got the final render files from Nick Welch, added everything together in Premiere Pro, drew a title card in Photoshop and made an outro sequence. I did some minor cosmetic fiddling but wasn’t keen to noodle too much, rather to let other people’s work stand as is.
Lo and behold – a new Beatboxing Dave short!
I’m super grateful to everyone who put their time and energy towards it. It celebrates creating for the sake of creating.
For myself, my motives were not purely altruistic – I was always going to put the film online on my Youtube channel, and monetize it. While I’m not earning mad bux off Youtube, the hope is that one day I have enough content generating decent bux, and that one day I create something SOOO kiff (maybe like the one Goldfish we made that’s clocked 7 million views) that a deluge of people look for the other stuff I have online, and that leads to a big influx of interest. In the meantime, I continue to make and put up work I think is cool.
I currently have 2 new Bru & Boegie shorts in various stages of completion, and a list of 4 possible shorts I’m considering working on next. One that I’ve been resisting for a while is a personal story short, which is probably the one I should probably focus on. It’s easier to do random wacky stuff than plumbing the internal depths. My mom taught me that sometimes the thing we avoid the most, the most shadowy part, is the part where we should be shining the light.
For other work, we’re months-deep in one super exciting project – 20 episodes of 90 seconds each. I’m pretty sure we’re under an NDA, and in some ways it’s been nice working under the radar for now to be able to focus on the work without the hoo-ha that can get in the way. It’s like we’re working on a really awesome present for an unsuspecting audience.
Also, the one music video I made for Takeshi hit 2 million views! That’s nice:
8bit / pixel art is the gift that keeps on giving.
Bonus: I got a SNES Classic Mini recently and made an unboxing video of it. Here that it.
And SUPER bonus – Goldfish today released the music video we made! I’ll do a separate post on this, but for now it’s viewable 🙂
Until next time, friendo’s.
Beatboxing Dave – ‘Forbidden Dance’ credits:
Created, Produced & Financed by
Mike Scott
http://www.mikescottanimation.com
Script by
James Wolfaardt
http://www.happychickensuicidecult.bl…
Additional Character Designs by
James Wolfaardt
Storyboards & Animatic by
Nick Welch
Animation by
Nick Welch – https://vimeo.com/nickwelch
Benito Kok – https://twitter.com/benikes
Backgrounds by
Luke Viljoen
Voices:
Beatboxing Dave, Passive-Aggressive Steve:
Mike Scott
Drum-Circle Craig, Cowbell Cow, Princess Lollipop:
Ben Badenhorst
http://www.benbadenhorst.co.za/
Funken, Derek-San, Metrognome:
James Wolfaardt
Audio Wrangler & Mastering by
Garth Jacobs
Voices recorded at BASE Studios in Plettenberg Bay
Music & SFX by
Arnie Rodriguez
https://www.youtube.com/user/ArnieRod…
