A goofy little short I put together to enter in Adult Swim.com's recent animation contest.

Usually when I find about about a call for anything, it's a week before the deadline, so I've never have a chance to enter. But for once I stumbled across something an entire month before the due date, so I put this together just because I finally could.

The theme of the thing was 'How do you embrace life?'. Their description reminded me of an audio clip I have of my friend Brett saying 'I get up with it down with it, love it and can't quit it, right on I'm the best that ever did it and got away with it.' so I decided to work that into it, and show a character just enjoying himself in whatever weird situation happened to present itself.

Bea Arthur Attacks!		Does the banana thing work? Well...

I came up with the storyboards (which would more accurately be described as a few scribbled notes) in one day, and wasted the rest of the first week editing something decent out of the music AS gave us.

I hadn't been expecting this to be nearly as complex as it ended up, so I didn't plan out anything. At all. I just started drawing and threw everything together in After Effects as I went along. This was, of course, a bad idea. I ended up with five or six compositions in each scene, each of which had up to 90 individual layers, as I just kept piling new things into each scene with no organization whatsoever.

You must love Bea!		60 layers = bad

The bird character was the worst, he had 50-some layers, each of which was named 'Layer 2' because I hadn't named them in Photoshop. In my defense, it has been a year since I last opened AE, and I'd somewhat (totally) forgotten how to use it. This is why I don't animate much. Planning is boring.

Angry!		Armed!		Armless!		And so on.

I did enjoy animating the Hentai Tentacle Death Bunnies, especially the wax lips one..wax lips are one of the greatest novelty inventions ever. The characters in that scene are mostly from a food/animal icon set I was going to make called 'My Friends are Delicious'. HJ Hare and the Baron (dressed, inexplicably, as Egon Spengler) are in there, too, although HJ, ended up with no hands. Oops.

My Friends are Delicious take on the evil HTDBs!!

The funeral scene is based on a wallpaper I had made awhile ago, and stars a wreath made entirely of cheesy clipart. I really love clipart, the more cliche, the better. The pointing hand is my favorite.

You can't see it, but the ghost has hairy legs. Just thought you'd like to know

The Mysterious Banana Beheading comes from a practical joke I read about in a book when I was probably in jr. high. So, I couldn't actually remember if I had it right or not. Or if it actually works. I vaugely remember it working, kind of. The problem is the needle holes go brown really quickly, leaving large rotten spots on an otherwise healthy piece of fruit. This alerts all but the most steadfastly unobervant to the fact that there may be trickery afoot within their banana. It's funny in theory, though.

Trickery!

All in all, it's not bad for a month's worth of my free time. There's stuff I'd change if I'd had more time, but all in all, it was pretty fun to animate something again, although I definitely prefer the design aspects of the thing over the individual setting of a bazillion keyframes.