And so it begins...

Bug House has officially moved from pre-production to production!  Jess and I met over waffle fries, and came up with a plan to animate the first 30 seconds of Bug House to use as a trailer.   First step is creating an animatic, which is a video of still images from the story filmed together to show roughly how the final product will look.  The animators are hard at work on it right now. 

To kick off production, one of our illustrators, Michael Lawrence, did some fantastic work on storyboarding.  Here’s a small snippet of his storyboards below.  I’ll post a few more in the weeks to come. 

Bug Mug Shots

Jess sent me a couple more sketches of our dastardly bug. She has apparently named this beast "Fuzzball".  If this whole thing works out, I think we're going to have to go with Fuzzball Productions for our enterprise. 

Bug: Prettified

You know what’s really cool about doing an animated film?  You can physically see progress.

As a writer, you don’t see progress; you feel it.  A paragraph “feels” right or a line of dialogue “feels” natural. But the black words on the white page in Draft One look an awful lot like the black words on the white page in Draft Seventeen. And there is a good chance your “feelings” are far too kind to tell you that Draft 17 isn't noticeably better than Draft One anyway. 

But the progress of animation is unmistakable, as it evolves right in front of your eyes.

As I have mentioned, Bug House is essentially the story of a kid’s pet bug.  And while I was busy eating Christmas pierogis, trying to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne, and playing far too much Wii Jeopardy with my family, Jess was hard at work taking this rough sketch she drew of our bug: 

and turning it into this concept sketch. 

There is more “bug” concept art coming, and I will post when I receive.  I will also be meeting with the other artists this month and will have some storyboards to post.   Happy New Year, all!