Granting Life to Napkin Doodles

For my pitch presentation back in November I threw together a very basic, scribbled animatic. This is essentially a preview of what the visuals will look like in the finished film, timed to dialogue. In some cases, like with a proper studio production, the animatic will be put together from pencil tests and set to the finished soundtrack so it ends up as a fair representation of what the cartoon will wind up as. In my case, it was cobbled together using scanned napkin drawings with me reading the dialogue in my monotone dirge of a voice (for the Duck I sped it up a bit, for the Hunter I slowed it down a bit - what a genius). Although it was rushed, the two scenes I included in the pitch presentation got the point across when coupled with the concept art. Given that it's been over a month since I started this journal and I haven't really included much by way of dialogue, I figured it'd make sense to put those sequences up on here. So look, you looky-loos:


This scene is better represented visually in one of the concept art stills. I imagine it will be one of the easier sequences to animate as it's basically just a back and forth between the two characters with the duck remaining prone and inanimate (a word that truly is an animator's friend) throughout.


This sequence is a bit more complicated, and again to get a better sense of how it'll look there's a concept still for it. While the animatic here re-uses a lot of the same drawings, the storyboard (which I'll start posting soon) has a lot of cartoon 'acting' in the facial expressions - the Hunter getting more appalled, the Prospective Lay alternating between dim and affronted, and the Duck laying it on thick with surreptitious leers and feigned hurt. Very little of that is evidenced here, again it's more a means of representing the dialogue (also, when I made the animatic I was still entertaining the possibility of animating the film in 3D CGI).
What I've confirmed with the animatic is that I definitely won't be doing the voice of the Duck. The voice on these clips bugs the hell out of me and my shitty acting takes a lot of the humour out of the dialogue. I have an old college friend in mind with whom I acted in a number of godawful school plays. Having talked to him about it recently he seems game, and knock wood we'll get some time soon to record it. The sooner I get the dialogue recorded, the sooner I can get cracking on the all-too intimidating dope sheets. More importantly, hearing me chatting up my own sister (who, while visiting, graciously did the Prospective Lay voice for the animatic) is all a bit too White Stripes for my liking.