Nethery-Ramsey Productions

Hello to all of our fans! This is the first of many posts on our feature length project: Average Joe's Great Escape!

A little info about the project:

We've been working on this film since January 2009 developing the story and writing the script (which is phenominal!). Bradley "Yeldarb" Ramsey penned the 125 page script over a few months, January to maybe late June,  and we didn't get around to recording it until around August. The reason being we were pretty occupied with finishing the third season of The Average Joe Show.

The funny thing is, this film actually started out as an episode of the show... but the ideas we had were so funny we had to make it feature length to do what we wanted with it.

So, after Bradley finally finished the script, we recorded it in August between episodes and launched right into the first sequence of the film beginning of September.

So right now we are on the fourth sequence of this giant of a film... and we aren't even a quarter of a way there yet... and we want to get this out by May 5th... will it happen? I think so. We're moving pretty fast and having a deadline makes us go even faster.

So Mark Niedermann and I are dividing up the animation between ourselves about 50/50. We've decided to take the "character approach", made famous by Disney Animation, where we each supervise the animation on our own characters. For the "Joe family", I'm supervising Joe and Susie. Mark, meanwhile, is handling Martha and Jack... and doing a bang up job!! Martha is Mark's specialty. He really gets her... better then I do actually.

I'm also handling the animation of the film's main villians: Principal Howard and Mr. Daemon (who made his first appearance in our 2008 Christmas Special).

So this way it's easy to keep the animation consistant. That doesn't mean that Mark or I won't get to animate a character we're not assigned to... far from it actually. I personally, want to touch a bit of each character, and Mark feels the same way, so for that reason, and for the reason that all together we are facing AT LEAST an hour and a half of animation (if not more) so it's impossible to split the sequences 50/50 without each of us getting a bit of each character.

We're also creating model sheets for all the characters which give us a visual guide to how these characters act (click to enlarge):

The expressions are very basic but they give us a starting point to create more specific expressions based on them.

I'll post more of these later. I'll also post some animation that I'm really pleased with as well.

That's all for now!

I went to see Shane Acker's 9 last week with some fairly low expectations. The reviews seemed mixed and all the critics, whether they liked it (like me) or hated it seemed to agree: the film is visually stunning but the characters are flat and one dimensional. The characters are really not characters... they are stereotypes. There's "the Hero", "The Sidekick", the "Kickbutt Female", "the Skeptical Old Guy", "the Big Strong Guy", etc.

Now I am able to forgive the flat characters because I found the whole world Acker created really cool. The scenery was wonderful, the action sequences are beautifully choreographed and animated and the character animation was, for the most part, solid.

I do have some complaints about the character animation and it all comes to the design of the characters... some of them look almost exactly the same apart from a few alterations in the colors. And, alot of the time, they move the same and make the same gestures and the same expressions... It just starts to look boring after awhile.

I think this problem could've been solved by assigning supervising animators to all the characters to make sure this problem does not occur. The supervising animators could've nailed down a certain way that each character moved and gestured and helped the animators stick to that. This is the sort of film where having character supervisers would've worked wonders for it.

It's not so bad when you have diverse looking characters like in a Pixar film like The IncrediblesUp when the design basically speaks for itself... but in the sistuation most of the characters look the same... I think character supervisors are needed. or

So those are my thoughts on 9 in a nutshell. It may seem like a fairly negative review but it really is not. I liked the film and think it's an admirable first effort and I wish everyone involved the best of luck. The film is short enough and visually stunning enough to where I can overlook the storytelling flaws. I think the length of the film really saves it. If it were any longer, I probably would've just lost interest.

I really hope this film succeeds and opens a door for more widely released adult-oriented animated films.

I give this film a B-. Not great for sure, but it's far from terrible.

-James N.-