I made a couple episodes of a cartoon and put the first one on Newgrounds. Episode two is finished and coming later this year.
Some might say that that's not a TV show. But why?
"Because it's not broadcast on television." So? Would you not refer to Severance, House of Cards, or Invincible as TV shows?
"Those shows all have big budgets." You allow the amount of money associated with something to determine its inclusion in an artistic medium? Do you let the price of paint determine what you consider a painting?
"Newgrounds isn't a streaming platform." It's a platform. It streams video. What am I missing?
"Newgrounds doesn't exclusively host video content." Yes, but Netflix has a games library too, albeit a less developed one. Amazon Prime started as a package delivery service. Streaming platforms are allowed to do other things.
"Anyone can submit something to Newgrounds." Yes. Just like anyone can submit a tape to a network. Some places require that you to submit your stuff to an agent or manager who then submits it to the network, but in any case: You submit something and it goes under judgement.
"It's different because their gatekeepers are paid professionals." Again: Does money = artistic merit? Is it more valid to have art curated by a community of volunteers, or by company-men seeking profit?
If this post was called "I started a band" or "I wrote a book" it wouldn't be met with any skepticism. Why do we still let the old guard of TV dictate what constitutes a "real" show? They crashed our party because theirs was dying, remember? Why do they get to make the rules?
(I know some of you will feel click-baited by the title. Sorry! In all seriousness, if you want to get your stuff on TV someday, this is an excellent resource.)
I don't consider myself an animator, but I made an animated series. It's called Babe Alert. Go watch episode one if you haven't.
This is a postmortem for that episode and a reflection on creating a series in general. I worked on every aspect of the production including writing, directing, animating, voice-acting, and 3D modeling. I'm sparing no detail. Get comfortable.
part one: PECK
In order to explain Babe Alert, I have to talk about Peck. About nine years ago my brother Marty and our friend Bob made a cartoon about an abusive little-league baseball coach and his gormless center fielder, the eponymous Peck. The cartoon began as a riff in a Skype call and grew into something bigger.
I was a huge fan of Peck during its development and insisted on helping to write the sequel, Peck Goes to School, which came out five months later.
While Marty was animating Peck Goes to School, we kept coming up with ideas for more episodes. Scripts were drafted for Peck 3 and 4, along with plans for a fifth. Given the rapid turnaround of the first two, thinking that far ahead felt appropriate. However, Peck 3 was never released.
This isn't a Peck 3 post-mortem. What happened there is more Marty's story to tell, but the gist is that circumstances changed and the show fell into indefinite hiatus. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about the characters and world of the series. I loved how the first two (and the planned future episodes) subverted expectations from one moment to the next. I felt like the show could serve as a kind of parody of childhood; satirizing all the stuff we saw as kids, from the media we consumed to the way our peers and teachers behaved. It was a rich vein. For years, the guys and I would post ideas for jokes and storylines in our group chat, compiling enough raw material over the years for like 40 or 50 more episodes.
I've always held out hope that one day we'll see more Peck, but it's not my show and that's not my call. I continued writing for other things, including my buddy Jon's excellent show Ratbasterdz, but I didn't see myself as an animator and so I never gave much consideration to doing my own animated thing.
part two: BABE ALERT
Two years ago I was invited to an annual cartoon/film screening where Jon and some people I knew through him showed off what they'd been working on. If you're an animator with online animation friends, I'd consider organizing your own such backyard film fest. It's a great excuse to hang out IRL, it gives you a socially-pressured deadline to finish something by, and everyone leaves creatively energized. That was how I felt, anyway. I told the organizer, Mike, that I'd have my own cartoon ready for next year's.
I wanted to make my own series, one that would use my best ideas from the Peck group chat. Thus, my initial premise for this show was much closer to Peck. It would be about a 36-year-old man (an analogue for Coach) who was still in high school after repeatedly failing his final exams. I later aged the character down to an 18-year-old kid who was taking his senior year over again. It's a less dark and a less absurd, much like the overall tonal difference between Peck and Babe Alert.
The Peck episodes were written to be short- all under 3 minutes. I wanted Babe Alert to be longer, like something you'd see on TV, and felt that to make that work the characters had to be more relatable. Characters as abrasive as Coach and flat as Peck can work well in small doses, but the edgy, manic energy of that show would be hard to sustain over a longer runtime without losing the audience. So Coach softened to become Kelly and Peck smartened up (and found a little more agency) to become Kurt.
I picked the names Kelly and Kurt mostly for the sake of meter in the theme song. Alliteration is memorable and K sounds are funny. Kelly used to be "Kenny," but if you type "Kenny" into Google you just get the South Park kid, so I picked something more distinct. I thought it was funny to use a name associated with girls, and it seemed fitting, given Kelly's ginger complexion, to use an Irish-American name. "Kurt" preserved the clipped monosyllabism of "Peck" that Bob had so much fun delivering in those shorts. It also rhymed with "Alert."
The name of the show had come to me with the premise. Peck never had much of a premise beyond "Peck and Coach do wacky stuff." I wanted to preserve that ability to go a lot of places, but I also wanted the show to have a memorable logline, so that if you asked a fan what it was about they'd know what to say. I recalled that when I was younger the episodes of a show where a kid was trying to impress a girl always felt like they had the highest stakes. Failure meant heartbreak and large-scale humiliation. Everyone feels awkward and insecure at that age, but it's compounded by the fact that any mistakes you make are remembered by everyone until you graduate. This is where the thing of not wanting to be a "nert" came in. The characters aren't motivated by the prospect of "scoring" like Beavis and Butthead. They just want to appear cool, and the media has taught them that getting babes is key to that. The premise is flexible. The characters can do anything as long as it is connected to some kind of scheme to appear cooler. A comparable model would be something like Ed Edd n' Eddie, where the characters want jawbreakers, which means they need quarters, which means they need to do some wacky scam, which often gets them sidetracked onto something else. It's not a show about jawbreakers.
I rounded things out with two supporting characters. The first is the rambling pushover teacher from Peck 2, a strait-laced foil to the main duo's antics. I did the voice of the teacher in Peck 2, and by coincidence went on to become a middle school teacher myself in the years since, so I had a lot of material for him. This time around he got a real name. Mr. Teachman. Sometimes it's best to not overthink things.
David was inspired by a character who is visible in the background of Peck 2 and we planned to properly introduce in Peck 3. Of course, I can't get too into that without spoiling things, but in short the character was planned to be a lurking agent of chaos, whose sinister nature is obvious to the audience but unnoticed by the characters. I liked the dramatic irony there, and his ability to create obstacles for the protagonists without needing much justification.
This is a little obvious but I see people on here forget it: Characters should have contrast. Contrast creates conflict, which every story needs. Contrast also broadens the number of subjects your series has access to. With Babe Alert, I can do storylines about childhood through Kurt, young adulthood (Kelly,) and middle-age (Teachman.) Also, contrast defines character traits. It's easier to see Kurt's meekness next to Kelly's braggadocio, the same way it's easier to see a red boat on a blue sea. More literally, the cast is built out of shapes and colors that contrast with the other characters. No two characters share the same height, build, hair color, skin tone, eyes, nose, etc.
I didn't have a tablet or even any animation software when I drew the original concept art, so I roughed everything out in MS paint with a mouse.
As you may have noticed in the example above, my draftsmanship is not of a professional standard. There's only one piece of concept art for the whole show because I don't know how to draw a character twice and have it look like the same guy, which is pretty much the job description for "animator." So how did I intend to make this thing?
I had some experience in 3D modeling from college. I decided to build 3D models of the sets and characters in Blender, then pose and shoot references of the characters from different angles and trace over them. This would keep the proportions and perspective consistent. I used Maya in college, but Blender was free and Bob had showed me that it could do 2D animation using a something called the Grease Pencil. It was clunky compared to Flash, but it had one advantage: you could apply a noise modifier to the line to create a line boil- the thing where characters stand still but their outlines keep jiggling around. I knew from watching Dr. Katz that a combination of line boil and dynamic camera angles can give the impression that a lot of animation is happening on screen, even if it isn't. I also knew from Dr. Katz that if I drew the backgrounds with thin, static lines and desaturated colors, characters and props with thick line boil would always pop, even if I botched the composition.
However, I hit a roadblock when trying to model and rig the characters. My attempt at modeling Kurt was too boxy, and I had trouble getting the rig to work. Luckily, my friend Ian (aka Croody) is a whiz at this sort of thing, and he volunteered to sculpt and rig all the characters based on my scratchy designs.
If it wasn't for him doing this I might've been too discouraged to even make the show this way, which is why Ian's name pops up with mine in the opening credits. (I realize that a "developed by" credit might mean something else if you're in the WGA, but who cares about those nerts?)
part three: THE OPENING
I made the opening/theme song before I wrote the episode. Knowing it was going to run in front of this episode AND all the others too, I wanted it to be high-effort and attention-grabbing.
I wanted the song to be catchy, so the name of the show would stick in people's brains. They might even go back to the episode again just to hear it. I also wanted the song to introduce the main characters and premise of the show. The more groundwork you lay in the opening, the quicker things can start in the episode. It also makes it easier for first-time viewers to follow along in future eps.
Side-note: if you're writing a series, you should consider that a lot of people won't start with episode one. You might not even want them starting with episode one, assuming you're getting better at making the show with each episode. A huge factor in Bridge Kids going viral on Youtube was that people were able to jump in on episode seven and not feel lost. Compare that to Sublo and Tangy Mustard- also a great show, but it must lose people who missed the "perpetual mascots" premise established at the start.
Anyway. I'm not a musician, but I figured I could do the music myself if it was just a digital drum loop with a bass drone underneath. I don't have any music composition software on my computer, but my iPhone has GarageBand and that comes with a virtual 808 as one of the instruments. (They have others, but if I'm playing fake drums I want them to sound like the fake drums.) I recorded myself beatboxing an approximation of what I envisioned and then used that to figure out where to place the notes in GarageBand. (I also used this technique to write a musical sting for transitions between scenes. A little ditty over an establishing shot goes a long way to making people feel like they're watching a real show!)
I recorded the rap myself, but I didn't want it to sound like me or my characters, so I ran it through an AI filter to give myself a deceased famous rapper's voice. I'm not going to say which rapper but it's one Kendrick got mad at Drake for doing AI of. I know people hate AI, but in my defense I saw a whole hologram of this dude perform at Coachella when I was a kid and everyone thought that was cool.
I made the first couple seconds with all the babes by tracing models stolen from Google images, adjusting their clothing and hair and enlarging their eyes for greater appeal. It took a while to get the colors right. I wanted it so if you watched the show in the middle of the night, your bedroom would wash over with a dozen different hues.
Finding the footage that ran in the background took longer. I looked around until I found clips with the right mix of motion, color, and vintage film/video stocks. I included shots of Heroes Tunnel and the iconic Blue Onion Dome to ground the show in Connecticut, where I grew up and envision the show taking place. I went to high school in that Blue Onion building, no joke.
I don't have pro editing software, so I downloaded the free version of CapCut to put this together. I didn't know how to export the drawings of Kelly and Kurt out of Blender with a transparent background, so I exported them with a green background and tried to chroma-key it out. The outlines got a crunchy texture, but it fit the gritty vibe so I kept it. I threw a fish eye filter over the characters to make it extra hip-hop. The clip at the end of the sequence is designed to be different every episode, like The Simpsons' couch gag. For example, this is the baking episode, so I used some footage of woman in a kitchen. What will it be next time? Who knows! (I do.)
part four: THE SCRIPT
My favorite part of the process is writing the script. If I could do that all day I'd be satisfied. One reason the show uses limited animation is because someday I want to turn around episodes at the rate that I'm able to come up with scripts for them, like on South Park. It will be the opposite of what happened to Peck. The only speed limit will be my imagination!
First episodes are hard in the way that first dates are hard. You try to be affable, but you're under immense pressure to make your audience like you. To stay oriented, I made a mental list of what my first episode needed. The series premise, the setting, the four major characters, at least one guaranteed big laugh... I'd had that "dippin' dots" cutaway in my back pocket for years and I knew it'd play well, and I figured it could break up a heavier setup about Kelly's uncertain future. The Home Ec thing came about because I couldn't commit to what subject Mr. Teachman should teach, so I decided I'd have him teach a subject that required a specific type of classroom, and planned to destroy that classroom at the end of the episode. With those pieces in place, writing the rest was just filling in gaps and finding jokes along the way.
When I write scripts I think a lot about efficiency. Cutting stuff is as important as writing it. This is most true in animation, where additional seconds of runtime can mean additional hours of labor.
The first scene, for example, could have started like this:
I'm skeptical of any scene that starts with one character walking up to the other and greeting them (aka "shoe leather") but it was extra important to watch out for on Babe Alert because I wanted to avoid animating walk cycles. Instead, the scene starts with the calendar already open. Kelly lays out the main conflict/stakes for the series in the first line: The big dance is coming up, and if they can't get dates for it, they'll be nerts for life. The clock's ticking. What will they do?
So in addition to setting up the series conflict, I also want to set up a smaller conflict to be resolved by the end of the episode: Kelly and Kurt are trying to get girls "the easy way" by blowing off their academic responsibilities and taking Home Ec instead. I also want to give a taste of the characters' personalities, motivations, and relationship. I worried it would be easy for the audience to turn on Kelly for making Kurt feel insecure if I didn't also showing Kelly's insecurity and make it clear that he saw Kurt as his best friend right after.
I chose NOT to spend time on how they know each other. I hate in movies when longtime friends remind themselves how they met. It's not just unrealistic. It also takes us out of the present and kills momentum. Also, as we saw in Peck, the relationship is funnier when you DON'T explain it. If it's truer, faster, and funnier NOT to do... why bother?
Efficient writing is all about looking for opportunities like this. Do we need this line? Can this happen faster without compromising the joke? Can we make this exposition funny? Can we make this joke expository? Can this punchline be the set-up to the next one? How can this stone kill two birds? How about instead of putting the calendar away neatly, Kelly flings it down the hallway? Etc.
In the next scene we meet Mr. Teachman. Something I lifted from Peck 2 was how the Teacher was always rambling in the background. While Peck and Coach were being funny, the stuff Teacher was saying was also funny if you listened for it. It rewarded repeat viewers, and stuffs two minutes of comedy into one. I also like what it says about his character that he gives long, earnest speeches that everyone ignores. Even the simple act of eating peach cobbler becomes funny if Kelly does it while the teacher is trying to deliver exposition to him.
In the next scene, David appears with a smash cut- a running gag that spares us more shoe leather. He sets up the second act of the episode by suggesting an evening bake-off. This gives us new stakes and a more immediate ticking clock. As pushy as David is though, the boys have the final say. They're the protagonists, so I want them making decisions to drive the plot.
In scene after that I attempt to deliver on the promise of the "Home Ec" premise. Since the actual bake-off never happens, all the baking jokes get crammed in here. Credit to Bob for coming up with the "strawberry long cake" joke, which replaced my less exciting "pineapple normal cake" joke.
Having David and Teachman in the hall during the climactic scene was useful because it meant I could cut away while Kurt ran across the room. I tried to give Kurt some agency, which was tricky because he's so deferential to everyone. Having him question Kelly at first and then come up with his own idea for the sabotage instead of aborting the mission felt like a good solution. The casual whistling joke was another one from the Peck archives, whereas the flashback ripple to gas leak joke just fell in my lap as I was writing. I've seen comedies subvert that visual trope a few times before, but never in this specific way, so I took it. Kelly throwing Kurt out the window, as you may have guessed, was another joke written to accommodate my shoe leather allergy.
I wanted Kelly and Kurt to remain sympathetic despite blowing up their teacher, so I tried to make it clear that the accident was a product of stupidity, not malice, and that the boys felt terrible about it. Mr. Teachman even gets what he wants to an extent- he's taught the boys a lesson and earned a little respect.
Side note: I know some of this section might feel a little "No duh" screenwriting 101, but there's a reason for that. So many aspiring animated series creators on NG have a copy of The Animator's Survival Kit on their desk, John K's Blog bookmarked, The 12 Principles tattooed on their arms, and zero understanding of how to tell a story. I know that as a writer I'm biased towards caring about the story more, but so are most audiences. Even Pixar will tell you that the story is king. A good story with bad animation is more watchable than the other way around, and fixing bad writing is way easier than fixing bad animation, so please, study this stuff too!
part five: THE AUDIO
It took some time to figure out the voice cast. I considered having Bob, Ian, Marty and I each take one voice. Then I considered doing all the voices myself, for convenience. After doing some test recordings I decided that it would be too hard to do four distinct voices and have them sound natural. I cast Bob as Kelly, an obvious choice given that he'd been Coach, but also because he's great at delivering a joke. He can do everything from flat deadpan to manic screaming, whatever's required. We lived in the same house at the time, so we hung some blankets up in his room and recorded the whole episode in one night, character by character.
It took me a while to feel out Kurt's voice- how high/slow/nasal/husky to make it. I was doing more of a Jason from Home Movies thing at first. Then I started doing an impression of this second grader I used to tutor. I found that setting the mic up higher and pointing my head up at the ceiling helped. David's voice is a Kelsey Grammer impression (really a Sideshow Bob impression) that I pushed further across the Atlantic. My take on Teachman, which didn't last, was me doing my teacher voice from Peck 2 but more New Yorky. At least, I think that's where we landed. I lost the audio files.
I didn't love the voice, but I couldn't think of anyone who'd bring the specific sort of semi-earnestness I was looking for. Then I got to know Peter better through some mutual friends, and it occurred to me that he would be great for the part. I messaged him asking if he'd be interested in a juicy role in my new cartoon and he responded with this voice message, which solidified my feeling that he was right for it. I threw out all my Teachman takes and rerecorded with Peter. He had to do a lot of semi-improvised rambling, including a twenty-minute debate with David over the merits of increasingly old and obscure Hollywood actresses. My idea was to play it low in the mix during the sabotage scene so you could faintly hear David/Teachman's conversation out in the hall, but it ended up being too unwieldy. We picked up the Gina Rowlands line later in retakes.
I hadn't directed actors in ages, and I was not good at it. I'd ask for take after take, demanding all these adjustments to get the exact reading I had in mind when I wrote it. Then in the edit I'd find that the first take was almost always the best. I also kept making actors read faster in an effort to max out laughs per minute. Their characters sounded like they had to run to the bathroom. I ended up editing in breaths to correct the pacing.
Newgrounds A-lister Ninjamuffin is fan of Peck and a personal friend of Marty's, so I reached out to him to see if he would do a cameo as The Future Babe from Kelly's fantasy. I was upfront with him that the primary goal of the cameo was to put the cartoon in the subscription feed of his 140k fans, and he was kind enough to oblige. I knew he wasn't a voice actor and that his recording quality would be rough, but my plan was to digitally alter his voice to make him sound some kind of android. At first I did this by messing with the pitch and EQ, but later I just ran him through an AI. Is it still "his" performance under all that? I say yes! Enough to put his name on the project, anyway.
Speaking of ethics, all the sound effects are stolen and uncredited. I know you're not supposed to say that but I'm trying to be real with you guys. I'm never going to monetize this show anyway. I don't pay for sound effects and I don't bother figuring out how to credit people for them. I'm sampling, okay? It's like hip-hop, it's cool. Not as cool as putting a bunch of freesound.org URLs in your credits, though, I guess. Sorry.
I don't like editing audio. When I'm animating, I can listen to audiobooks or call my friends. When I'm writing, I can listen to music. When editing audio, that's it. I don't trust my ears either. Is the volume on this line right? I don't know. I have to look at the waveform, and even then I second guess myself. I was slow to finish the editing despite the screening submission deadline creeping closer each day.
part six: THE SETS
I procrastinated on the audio by building sets. The hallway was an easy place to begin. I modeled one locker and then duplicated it a hundred times. I didn't texture anything, but I would color different elements because the contrast helped with tracing. For the floor tiles, I just traced Blender's default grid lines.
The Home Ec room took longer. It was more like three sets: the classroomy area, the boy's station, and Mr. Teachman's station. It had to be a big room to justify the way characters split off in the finale: Kelly needs to be over by the door while Kurt contemplates the sabotage, Kurt needs to cut the cord without anyone seeing, the boys need to speak without Mr. Teachman hearing, et cetera. Knowing it was all going to be obliterated at the end of the episode took some pressure off though. The set had to work for the scenes I'd written, and then we'd never see it again.
Some things, like the washing machines, I'd make myself. More complicated appliances, like the stand mixers, I'd rip from free 3D asset packs. The cabinets were also taken from asset packs, but remixed and duplicated to fit the layout I had planned. It took a lot of work to get the room feeling as busy as a real classroom.
The futuristic set was just a model of a balcony. The skyline behind it is a collage of AI-generated abstract buildings that I traced over. An occluded horizon and alien architecture help hide perspective mistakes.
The exterior of the school was a traced photograph of the actual high school I graduated from. (Not the Blue Onion, the other one. That's right folks: I have two high school diplomas.) There isn't a sign like that out front in real life, but I added one so you knew you were looking at a school and also so I could squeeze in little sign gags like on The Simpsons.
Croody volunteered to put together the hospital room. During crunch time, he'd end up tracing some of it too.
part seven: THE ANIMATION(?)
I had half a year to do all the animation. Nine minutes sounded like a lot, but I planned to take a lot of shortcuts. Sorry Mr. Teachman.
I only drew key poses, no in-betweens. I also cut around action whenever possible. Mr. Teachman getting out of his chair, walking around the desk and taking a new seat isn't shown, it's implied through sound effects and the tracking of other characters' pupils. Thank god audiences tend to follow characters eyes, because pupils, eyebrows, and eyelids are easy to draw. The lip-sync is three mouths (closed, semi-open, open) that most of the time just play in a loop. I'd hold on some frames to match a long vowel or long pause, but as long as a mouth started flapping when a character started speaking and stopped when they stop, people would buy it. (Line boil helps.)
The show's boxy aspect ratio is more nostalgic, more suitable for the age of vertical-viewing, and better for comedy. It also lets the main characters fill most of the screen, so fewer lines are needed for backgrounds. I try to hide the fact that we only have four character rigs. I imply the existence of other people through crowd sounds and strategic camera angles.
For example, when we first see Kelly and Kurt, they're shot from above, pressed up against the lockers. That way I can get them both in the shot without shooting down the hallway, calling attention to its emptiness. I suppose I could have gotten a flat composition if I cheated and removed the opposite wall like a sitcom set, but seeing as I was tracing backgrounds, it was no more difficult to go for the weird angle. These angles became even weirder as I recycled them. Kelly is square in the frame at the start when he's hunched over, but once he straightens up his hat gets cut off. Oh well. It's just more "dynamic."
Blender ended up being a huge pain in the ass though. I thought that I'd be able to trace right over the 3D image on a drawing plane in the same file, but if there's a way to do this while preserving line thickness, neither I nor Bob nor any other Blender user we reached out to could find it. I had to export screencaps of the 3D models and then import them into a separate .blend file that was set up for 2D- or as set up for 2D as Blender can be. It's no substitute for Flash, folks. The timeline sucks, the fill bucket sucks, there's no symbols, and it's just plain SLOW. Grease Pencil may be great for cute demos on Bluesky, but trying to coax it into making a proper cartoon killed me. Couple that with my inexperience managing a project of this scope and I found myself struggling to get it done in time. I had to ask Mike for an extension to the deadline.
I had more time to work on the cartoon when school ended in Summer, but I was still falling way behind schedule. I wanted to be optimistic that I could get it done, but that led me to underestimating how much time a scene would take, over and over again. With the screening coming up fast, I confessed to Mike that even with the extension I was feeling uncertain about my ability to finish. Mike was sympathetic to my situation, and despite having a ton of stuff on his plate preparing for the screening, he offered to jump in and help with the animation. I made reference images while he traced. He suggested we reach out to Bob and Ian to help trace as well. It was crunch time.
I'm not good at staying up late. Every hour I'm up past my bedtime my IQ drops by about 5 points. I remember one night towards the end, I started to hallucinate. The lines I was drawing began to lift off the monitor like little black worms in a bucket of water. I'm forever grateful to my friends for picking up the slack when I was burning out. It was thanks to their efforts that I was able to finish the cartoon in time to be added to the screening.
The cartoon did well at the screening. The biggest laughs came from the gas rippling, which Mike did in Adobe Premiere, and the explosion, which featured an epic impact frame by Bob.
However, there were some things I still was unsatisfied with.
part eight: FINISHING TOUCHES
I've always been a perfectionist. My mom claims I didn't speak until I was able to form full sentences. (First words: "I'll have cereal, please.") While working on Babe Alert, though, I was able defy some of that lifelong perfectionism and prioritize the important stuff by using a trick I call "The Gravy List."
As you're working, every time you see see some minor thing that you want to take some time to adjust, don't. Put it on a list and tell yourself you'll come back to it when you finish the rest of the cartoon. If it still bothers then, you can fix it, but the point is you're cooking the turkey first and adding gravy later if there's time.
Some examples of gravy: We didn't have time to get every drawing perfect at the end, so I went back and redid a bunch of them. Kurt's pupil proportions were inconsistent, and they still are, but less so now. On Mike's suggestion, I made Future Babe cuter by tracing actual photos. (Before that I was tracing a 3D model of an anime girl.) I made a credit song (GarageBand again) and credits (Using a font in Flash this time instead of tracing text in Blender, because Blender sucks and tracing sucks.) The post-credits scene is a joke I came up with after the screening but wanted to throw in. Also the moon face and clocks are accurate.
The last things I fixed were spelling mistakes in the background. For some reason I wrote "Mr. Teechman" on the board. I guess trying to be clever or something? Also, I'd written "Patriots Day" on the sign, which is a holiday in April. "Patriot Day," with no S, is the September 11th remembrance holiday. (They cancel a 9/11 tribute for a bake-off, is the joke.)
I made a nice clickbait-y thumbnail. Rather than upload as myself, I created a new account to represent the collective of people who worked on the cartoon. There's a deeper logic to this but I'll save it for the E2 post mortem. I've already finished Episode 2 but that's a whole other story. I'm scraping against the character limit but for an "afterword" about why I wrote this huge blog, please read my huge post in the comments. Love you bye!
