Big Hair

There is a screenwriting mantra that says, “show, don’t tell.”  Basically, the more you show through character’s actions, the less you have to actually speak through dialogue.  And when you are producing a dialogue-free cartoon such as Bug House, well -- it’s your only method of communication to the audience. 

But this is where the benefit of animation comes in.   In animation you can give a non-verbal cue to a body part not generally considered emotive.  Like, for instance, hair.  Our main character Dusty has big blond pigtails, and our character animator Dwight came up with the idea to use her hair like a dog’s ears – they perk up when she’s happy, and droop when she’s angry and mad. 

In other news, we have another animator on board with the project to assemble the pieces of the animatic.   We’re always looking for more, especially those that have their own animation software.  We’ve been doing a lot of the work on this film remotely, so they don’t need to be Boston-based necessarily.  If you know someone, have them contact Jenn at bughousemovie@gmail.com

New Characters

We’re still in the process of building the animatic movie.  But for now we have two more character sketches from Dwight – the detention monitor and the school principal.  I’m pretty sure I’ve had this lady in detention….

Animatic Production Begins!

And we’re plugging away!  A couple more images to show you. 

The first is Dwight’s image for the teacher.  The look I wanted was “Beaten Down Grade School Teacher”.  He succeeded quite admirably.

The second is Mike’s colored background of the first shot.  We’re still finalizing it, but as far as color scheme, this reminds me perfectly of a grade school classroom. 

The third is placement of props and characters into the first scene. 

It’s a-coming! More updates next week! 

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! 

Sketchy Characters

Today I met with the newest member of the Bug House animation team, Dwight Hill.  After being initiated into the Bug House tribe by ingesting the obligatory Joshua Tree waffle fries, he shared his sample ROUGH sketches (his emphasis, not mine) of three of the characters. So below in order are: Dusty (our protagonist and owner of the controversial pet bug), Alice (Dusty’s perfectly coiffed nemesis), and one minor character: the Show-and-tell boy with the Venus Fly trap. 

This week I’m meeting with two more illustrators.  I am giving all the illustrators a storyboarding assignment, and we will be meeting up again in January to share them.  Until then, I'll be updating the blog with more sample sketches as I get them.