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Great Escape- The Production Diaries (by James N.)

Posted by James Nethery on September 29, 2009 at 4:18 PM

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!

Categories: Average Joe's Great Escape, Feature Films, Animation

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2 Comments

Reply Eric
10:18 AM on July 29, 2010
What program are you using to animate this? From the shading, it looks like Anime Studio to me. If so, I'd like to donate some backgrounds and stuff.

-Eric
http://www.cartoonlearning.com
Reply James Nethery
12:21 PM on July 29, 2010
Eric says...
What program are you using to animate this? From the shading, it looks like Anime Studio to me. If so, I'd like to donate some backgrounds and stuff.

-Eric
http://www.cartoonlearning.com


Yeah it's Anime Studio.