Storyboarding

Click to see bigger.

This week work continued on the Crawford the Cat project. Above is a storyboard page from the show. The storyboard is generated from the script. On this particular show, however, the scripting is not entirely finished. Because of upcoming sales meetings, we are producing a sequence of the show in concurrence with the completion of the writing and storyboarding chores. This is not entirely unusual for us. On “The Ugly Duckling’s Christmas Wish,” a movie we made a few years back, our distributor on that film, Sunbow Entertainment, was able to do advance sales based on a few minutes of the show. That film did pretty well for itself, particularly in Germany. On its initial German broadcast, it won the TV ratings for its timeslot. They sent us a copy of the show with the German dub. Again, it was fun to hear how they had recast the show with the foreign actors. I’m always amazed at how close they can come to finding actors that sound like the English speaking actors.
Speaking of actors, we also recorded some more track for the show this week, so that direction and animation can continue for the promotional piece. I’ll try to post a clip from that recording session as soon as it’s edited.

Slightly Snowbound

Harriet from the Crawford The Cat Special.

Well, development and preliminary production work did continue this week, despite the fact that Indianapolis was hit with a sizable snowfall on Monday night – about 14 inches - and it’s snowing again as I write this. I personally was unable to make it in to the studio for two days, and did what work I could from my home. My business partner Brian Reynolds, on the other hand, was able to do quite a bit of initial animation production work from his home on Tuesday. However by Wednesday afternoon, he had to brave the elements and get back to the studio. The city does a pretty good job plowing the streets; it just takes a little time, especially when it’s coming down as fast as they can clear it away. Regarding the production of this special, as soon as we get a little further into it, we’ll post some animation clips on our website for you to view.

My wife took the above picture of our youngest daughter, Olivia, playing in the backyard during the first day we were snowbound at home.

Ahh winter!

CRAWFORD THE CAT

Currently our studio is in development on a new website CrawfordTheCat.com featuring our character CRAWFORD THE CAT. We're very proud of the site as it develops and hope that it will be well received by parents and the educational market. Being a parent of young children, the project is very close to my heart. The anchor to the website is "CRAWFORD’S CORNER" - a “how-to” series of 13 x 5 minute shorts designed for preschoolers, kindergarten and older. The shorts, completed in 2003, have not been seen in the US television market until now -and only at CrawfordTheCat.com.

Stop by the website and take a look. We hope you like it!

We’ll post more on CrawfordTheCat.com later, and more about the Crawford television special we're developing.

FAT TUEZDAY - LIVE

We put the first :30 second FAT TUEZDAY on our website as well as on YouTube this week. It’s a new venture for us in that it is the first property we will be introducing exclusively on the internet. FAT TUEZDAY features Tuezday – a modern day hippo who interprets life in her own way. Weight loss and the pressures of society on women to keep rail-thin (and Tuezday’s take on it) will be the subject matter for the first ones. Hopefully, they’ll each be amusing and none too serious. They’re each slated to be less than a minute in length. My business partner Brian Reynolds likens these short episodes to comic strips – only with moving pictures. Eventually the shorts will be made available for downloading to ipod and etc.

Check out FAT TUEZDAY here or on YouTube.

Crazy About Numbers

This week at the studio we finished a short piece of test animation for a proposed new television series – CRAZY ABOUT NUMBERS. The concept for the show was created by Phillip L. Prime, and it explores an innovative and fun way to introduce pre-school age children to basic mathematics. The test piece of animation demonstrates how three “ones” become a “three.” The proposed CRAZY ABOUT NUMBERS show calls for other segments of animation featuring non-number characters as well, and explores the possibility of utilizing several different types of animation in the same show. It sounds fresh and exciting. We wish Phillip good luck with the continued development of the show.

Click here to see the animation!

Russ Harris

From Shorts to "Longs"

What with "Crawford's Corner," "Handycat" and other projects, the studio has been in development and/or production on a lot of shorts recently, so what I've been working on for the past couple of weeks, an hour-long script for a "Crawford" special, is a bit of an adjustment. More on the specific project itself later when things have been firmed up a bit more, but coming back to Crawford the Cat has been fun for me. The 13 preschool educational shorts we did with him are probably my proudest achievement at the studio. I don't get tired of looking at him or drawing him. In fact, I have said that Crawford is the one character I have designed, that had it been by some other studio, I would be jealous and want it. Yet, it didn't come easily. He changed a lot as he was developed.

Originally conceived for a direct-to-video Christmas movie that didn't happen, he started out black and white and rather old looking. The next incarnation was a half-hour birthday themed preschool title. That didn't happen either, though by then he was getting at least closer to what he looks like today. By then, he looked like this:

- still black and white but not quite so young.

We were getting ready to ink and paint our pilot Crawford short when we opened a Kidscreen magazine and saw an ad for a new show with a black and white cat. It was just too close for comfort, so we made a bunch of color model cels of different color cats... and we finally settled on the green because we hadn't seen any other little green cats.

Now, I can't imagine him being any other color of course, and his face and body underwent more transformation until we got to the image you see at the top of this post - perkier and more youthful.

We are convinced that the character has great appeal in form and personality and will continue to look for ways to get his "face" in front of the public. This hour script I'm working on right now may be a very good way to do that.

FAT TUEZDAY

This week found us busy at the studio on several different projects. FAT TUEZDAY is our latest propriety property. This year, we are planning to produce multiple 30+ second episodes to be exhibited online and downloaded. The first one “Fat Tuezday’s: Walk The Dog” will be finished this week and will be uploaded to the Perennial Pictures Website soon after. Other projects in the works this week included a pilot piece of animation for a proposed PBS show, and scripting on an hour special for television. More information to come.