For those of you that are new here, a small portion of this trailer is going to appear in "Super Sheep in Holly-Weird Hijinks" Saga (you can read up on how that's going here), I'm not actually working on a live action Bitris 16 movie at the moment. The reason I'm doing a whole trailer instead of animating the part that'll appear in the actual cartoon is because I want to use this as a test for this new piece of free 2D animation software I found called OpenToonZ (which will likely replace Dreams PS4/5 if all goes well), plus it'll make having the characters pause the trailer easier in the long run:
With that little bit of pre-requisite context out of the way, why am I doing the trailer on a creative level. You see, The "Holly-Weird Hijinks" saga will see Super Sheep and his friends (not pictured in any of these storyboards) going up against clones of themselves that were engineered by a guy named Clint E. Orson using a machine called the Celebri-Maker 3000. What does Bitris 16 from "Captain Cartridge and friends in Operation Compact Disc" have to do with any of this? Well near the beginning, I decided to have Captain Cartridge, Bitris 16 and their crew find out about the existence of a "live-action" Bitris 16 movie Clint's studio, Rip-Stickler Studios, made without the actual Bitris 16's involvement or blessing, causing him and the crew to shirk their 55 year rubbish cleaning job. This little sub-plot serves as a way to slowly introduce Rip-Stickler Studios and the idea of films being made using genetically altered clones as actors to the audience before the cloning machine gets used to try and defeat Super Sheep and friends. (and also because crossovers are fun)
As you could no doubt tell from the storyboards and the way Holi-Bitris 16 acts in particular, I want to take inspiration from the first trailer for the live action Sonic The Hedgehog with the ugly Sonic in it (which is where I also drew inspiration for the design of both Holi-Bitris 16 and The "Justice Squad 1" characters):
The reason for this is because the sonic trailer is the example I have the most... let's say "personal experience" with this trailer, as from the moment I first saw this thing in High School, I vociferously hated it, likely because I'm such a huge fan of the source material this was supposedly based on. (I can only imagine this is how fans of Garfield, Scooby Doo, Alvin and The Chipmunks, The Smurfs, Ext. must have felt when it was their franchise's turn to get the live action film treatment) With this in mind, the mentality involved with this first movie sonic design (where they seem to just take the original source material and mangle it with realism until it's barely recognisable anymore) is one of the main things being lampooned in this saga.
So without further ado, let's establish what this trailer is actually going to be in terms of length and tone.
What This Trailer Is Actually Going To Be In Terms Of Length And Tone
This particular trailer will be around two minutes since that's about the average length of film trailers these days:
As for the tone, it'll take on a similar tone to that of trailers for other live action adaptations such as The Smurfs, Garfield, and especially Sonic The Hedgehog (2020) but with a slight "tongue and cheek" touch to it of course since this is a parody meant to set the uncaring tone of Rip Stickler Studios that'll persist throughout the rest of the Saga (what with Clint's frivolous actions where he creates super powered clones that are stronger than him)
Now that that's quickly been established, it's time to get the cast together.
Getting The Cast Together
I've already got Holi-Bitris 16 and Kyoto Kasuma's designs down pat because I made Bitris 16 years ago and Kyoto Kasuma was made for my last FMP for college (although Kyoto will be needing alternative outfits for this one) but for this trailer I'll be needing a few new characters (I.E: Bitris 16's villain) because it'll help me fill out the trailer and even expand a little bit on the Bitris 16 lore while I'm at it.
Cast:
Kyoto Kasuma - "Jennifer Anne Knuckles"
Holi-Bitris 16 - "Bitris 16"
TEMP NAME - "Bitris 16's nemesis (TEMP NAME)"
TEMP NAME 2 - "Generic Human Male Main Character (TEMP NAME)"
TEMP NAME 3 - "Generic Cooperate Accountant (TEMP NAME)"
As you can see, most of the characters on this list aren't even named yet, so I'll need to get to work on actually making said characters right away, starting with Bitris 16's new nemesis because if this project (and by extension the entire Holly-Weird Hijinks Saga) falls through, I'll still have at least one character I can use in one of my other IP (mainly Captain Cartridge and a potential Bitris 16 spin off) down the road.
Bitris 16's nemesis: Dr. Bikeris Gasino
For this new character, much like what I did for Bitris 16 himself, I took most of my inspiration from both the Sonic The Hedgehog and Alex Kidd series' but instead of Sonic and Alex Kidd themselves, I took inspiration from their nemesies'. (those being Dr Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik and Janken The Great respectively)
I decided to make Dr Bikeris look like Bitris 16 himself except instead he's green and wears a black and red outfit ala Dr Robotnik from the Sonic games.
I decided early on to give Dr Bikeris a bit of a biker motif via things like the skull on his shirt, his black shoes, his goggles for when he rides his motorbike and even the spikes he has on his arms in a similar vain to Bowser from the Super Mario games.
As for why he looks so cartoony despite the fact he's meant for a "live action adaptation" style trailer? well I figured I could use this as a base to mess with when designing the "Hollywood executive approved" version of the character.
Speaking of, guess who's next. That's right it's...
Holi-Dr Bikeris Gasino
That's right, this time I radically altered the design to the point where if I didn't keep things like the belt and a little bit of that spikey hair, you wouldn't think this was the same person. The reason I did this is because much like in the case of the Sonic The Hedgehog movie (the live action one, not the OVA), I figured the studio executives would go with a plot that makes this the origin story of how Bitris 16 and Bikeris became who they are in the game (which in most cases is merely an excuse to have the characters act nothing like in the source material until near the end of the film)
While I was doing the design for him, I ended up getting a bit of an idea as to what his role could be in the trailer, as I decided to make him a C.E.O instead of a biker person. (since as we all know, kid's definitely enjoy seeing what boring C.E.O and a corporate accountant are up to and most certainly won't wish to see Bitris 16 in a movie that's supposed to be about Bitris 16) Basically what I'm thinking is that Bikeris could be the C.E.O in charge of the company Kyoto... uuuh, I mean "Jennifer", works at and he could antagonise her via passive aggression, which would net me the bonus point of having social commentary that isn't needed since the source material didn't have anything of that nature to begin with.
Although with this, I'm starting to realise I'm running very low on time to do this and OpenToonZ may take a while for me to learn, so I'm afraid I'll be putting this and the Super Sheep in Hollyweird Hijinks saga on hold for the time being because I know there's no way I'll be able to put this together in the time I have left before University starts.
To make up for this, I'll be doing yet another post where I look into the existence of these live action adaptations (which come to think of it is what I should have done in the first place) and the people who make them.
OK, I'm Back. Let's Get Scripting!
After taking some time off, I ended up thinking to myself "ok, I know I don't have enough time to make the finished animation before university starts, but I might just have time to do the script for this thing." The reason I'm doing this is so that I don't have to worry about writing said script once university starts (since I'll have a lot on my plate once I'm there) so without further ado, let's get scripting.
Before we move on to the first page, I just want to say that while I've scripted a teaser trailer before, this one is going to be a little bit different, as unlike my teaser trailer for Super Sheep in Holly-weird Hijinks (back when that was supposed to be a normal one and done tale) all the footage is supposed to look like it's coming from a much larger project. The trouble is, I don't actually have the larger Bitris 16 film project on hand on account of the fact I don't plan on making it since this trailer is supposed to exist within the universe Super Sheep and friends reside in (which I'm thinking of calling the "Slamination Studi-verse" because combining words is fun), as such, the script this time around might end up jumping around a lot
For this trailer, I'm choosing to put most of the focus on the character of Jennifer Anne Knuckles (who remember, is played by the also fictional Kyoto Kasuma) rather than Bitris 16 himself (the actual title character) because not only does it serve as a dig at the fact these adaptations usually end up focusing more on the human side of things at the end of the day, but it's also meant to imply that the studio behind it are fully aware of their status as part of Hex Moother's virtual corporate monopoly.
In order to make it as clear as possible whenever we're jumping to a different point the supposed film, I'm adding "CUT:" in the line above every new location except the first one, that way I'll know when I'm supposed to cut to a new location.
Man, that didn't take very long. I thought doing this would be a bit more difficult than it ended up being in the end, although I do want to bring up one small element that I put in that may end up changing, and that's this bit right here:
The reason I put that line in there in the first place is to add in a little bit of needless adult humour into the mix, as the adults will know that when Holi-Bikeris Gasino refers to "a pair of invaluable assets", he's referring to Jennifer's (for lack of a better word) breasts. The reason I might end up changing this is mainly out of fear that I'd be going too far with that particular joke (since at the end of the day, kids are meant to be able to enjoy this too), so don't get too attached to it.
Now that the script is finished quicker than I expected, it's time to move on to the storyboarding phase!
The Storyboarding Phase
Now, before we begin, I just want to prerequisite this by saying that because I've already evidenced much of my process in the main project, I won't be going into great detail about how I do things here (unless something new crops up that I simply have to mention), so I'll just be doing the batches and then showing each finished batch one at a time.
while I was doing Holi-Bikeris Gasino, I ended up getting the idea to give him a different name that he'll be known by before making the transformation and ultimately becoming "Bikeris Gasino" (that being Bartholomew Gasino), since I figured him already being called "Bikeris" wouldn't make sense since he's currently a C.E.O who doesn't look like he could be part of a biker gang.
This batch was fairly easy to pull off since I'm just doing my normal technique when it comes to this process, the hardest part was making sure that the text in the second panel left enough room so that you could see the top part of the fourth.
As you can no doubt tell from the image, I've ultimately decided to keep the adult joke in there for two main reasons. Reason one is because it's the villain that's saying this and not the heroes, as such it should hopefully mean that the audience will understand that I'm out here demonising this sort of thing by having the villain do it. Reason two on the other hand is something I came up with while making this batch that could be a useful plot point for Super Sheep in Holly-weird Hijinks. (which is the main project I'm doing this trailer for in the first place) The plot point in question would revolve around that particular joke actually causing a bit of a controversy, thus besmirching the real Bitris 16's reputation by mere association. I think this plot point would work well, as not only does it mean the adult joke gets to be commentary about needless adult humour being inserted into films like this one haphazardly, but it also adds an extra layer to the real Bitris 16's motivation of going to earth to try and destroy his Hollywood imposter, as the controversy angle would also mean I could put The entirety of the Generive's crew's jobs at stake due to their proximity to Bitris 16 himself, thus giving Captain Cartridge, Randimeer B. Process and even Voltrix a vested interest in the situation besides trying to catch Super Sheep and friends. (although I should keep in mind the Bitris 16 stuff is simply a sub-plot, so I'd need to tie it back to the main plot too)
for this one, I should take the opportunity to explain why I'm not referring to the characters of Holi-Bitris 16 and Holi-Bikeris Gasino (AKA: Bartholomew Gasino) or even Kyoto Kasuma by their actual names in this storyboard. The reason I'm doing this is because I'm trying to make it seem like these storyboards would actually come from a theoretical live action Bitris 16 movie. Hopefully this should clear up any confusion as to what's going on here and why Holi-bitris 16 isn't named as such.
The most I can really say with this batch is that I did get to use the shape tool to create that little stripe with text you often see on news channels whenever they cover a certain news story, and writing the headline was quite fun, the reason it's formatted the way it is is because I was making a reference to the "is this a pigeon" meme. (which as it turns out doesn't originate from the Pokémon anime like I thought it did this entire time) As for the random Knuckles image I put in, that's actually part of an in-joke meant for fellow Sonic fans out there. To give a brief explanation as to the joke itself, it's a reference to the games Sonic The Hedgehog 3 and Sonic And Knuckles and the fact that when you combined the two games via "Lock-On Technology", you get Sonic The Hedgehog 3: And Knuckles. (hence why I've been putting a version of Knuckles himself into the 3rd batch of all my storyboards)
The hardest part this time was trying to draw a motorcycle. Speaking of, I decided to change it from evil cars to evil bikes because I felt it would make more sense with the guy who's name would go on to be "BIKEris Gasino"
For the first panel, I had to consider whether or not I wanted Holi-Bitris 16 do actually do something that's totally trendy by the standards of several years ago in order to make this trailer fit on with others like it since the live action Sonic movie had Sonic do the floss, a dance most heavily associated with the, unfortunately still very popular, game known as Fortnite. (specifically the Battle Royale mode) Part of the reason I hesitated was because I didn't know whether it would be worth having one of my characters do such a thing, considering trends come and go faster than the production of your average film, video game or tv show (especially if your film and/or TV show is animated), thus meaning by the time I animate the trailer, it'll be dated upon arrival. At the same time however, the trailer coming off as cringy is purposeful, as it's meant to rile up the real Bitris 16 and kickstart Captain Cartridge and Crew's journey to take down Holi-Bitris 16 and ultimately arrest Super Sheep and friends, so I decided to draw Holi-Bitris 16 doing a dab (since that's also a trend that came and went)
We're almost finished already, I just have the winter 2019 release panel to go and I'm done here
Well, that wasn't anywhere near as lengthy as I thought it would be, even with the changes I made to try and improve the trailer It still only took me around 4 days to complete this part of the process (although given the fact this is a mere two minute trailer as well as some of the corners I cut, I suppose I really should have seen this coming)
As such, it's time for me to do the rest of the character designs.
Back To The Character Designs
Before I can move on to the next part of the process, I still have to design a couple of characters (by that I mean I need to make two variants and one new character) and then I'll be done
Ok, so evidently, I may have gotten a bit carried away with this one, as instead of just designing one or two characters, I ended up getting all of the remaining character design work done in one fell swoop (which took over an hour to complete)
First I did the version of Bikeris you'll see at the end of the trailer after the title has already passed. For him, I used the version you'll see throughout much of the trailer and the design of the real Bikeris and even Holi-Bitris 16 himself as a point of reference since this design is supposed to look closer to the original while still getting major things "wrong" on purpose and even making him look more like the Hollywood approved version of Bitris 16 himself. (and as an added bonus, I was also able to steal the colours I used on my other designs and stick them here)
As for Kyoto... uuuh, I mean "Jennifer Anne Knuckles", I decided to take the design I did for Kyoto Kasuma (who's the actual character in the trailer playing "Jennifer" in the first place) and dressed her in attire that would be typical for that of a corporate accountant/executive person to really sell the whole "generic human lead" angle I'm taking the character in. Now, because this is supposed to look like it's part of a major Hollywood production, I also decided to add red lipstick, and light blue eye shadow as a means of hiding her black eye since Hollywood just loves dolling people up to make them look more attractive to the audience, although sometimes they'll also do the opposite too (which I assume would be called "dolling down"), as with the first Diary Of A Wimpy Kid movie, they had to give spots to a kid who didn't have spots via make up.
Next came Jennifer's husband, Steven Knuckles (who's alternative name for every other appearance will be "Richard R. Boxford"), the funny thing with him is that I never actually intended to give him an under shirt, but after realising I forgot to remove a line that sectioned off his hand from the rest of his arm, I ended up liking the idea enough to go with it in the end, and I think it makes the character look a little bit better.
As for the generic corporate stooge/secret service guy, I basically created a design that could be duplicated over and over again just altered in minor ways (since this is supposed to be a background extra after all)
Now that all that's been taken care of, it's time to move on to the next part of production, that being...
The Animatic
yeah that's right, it's finally time to do the thing I've been skipping in all my previous projects, the animatic. This particular part of production is basically where you create a moving image version of the storyboards you (hopefully) created before hand, this part is important because it lets you have a rough idea as to how you want to time all the movements, dialogue, music, sound effects, ext. (despite the fact I always ended up skipping this part and still managed to get top grades) Animatics also tend to use much cleaner drawings that are much closer to what the final visuals will look like since the voice actors will need to do their best to sync up with what's happening so you can't afford to be as sloppy with the artwork. They typically look something like this these days:
Obviously they won't have the full finalised audio track in place since the production is still being worked on, a better example of such a thing would come from Pixar's Toy Story (which itself was made when digital software wasn't as widely available so the animatic consists of photos of the actual storyboards):
With that pre-requisite out of the way, I'm probably not going to be able to start right away because University is literally right around the corner as we speak.
Ok, I'm Back
So production is going to happen a lot more slowly come the second week of university since this week is just a welcome week and I've learned that all my alternative software choices, I.E: OpenToonZ instead of ToonBoom, Shotcut instead of Premier Pro, ext, are basically useless now since I won't be allowed to use them in class time. (a bit of a bummer, but now we'll get to see if I really have what it takes to succeed again under yet another bombastic change to the rules of the game)
As such, I'll continue to use my alternative software choices for my personal stuff (since I don't want to pay subscription fees to animate my little blue cartoon sheep when I can do it for free with the right tools and a little bit of creativity and know-how), including this project.
As for the project itself, I'm going to need to decide a few things before I begin the animatic process, first I'll need to pick the trailer's soundtrack, since that'll be what I then need to sync the trailer to once the animation process begins.
With this in mind, since I'm trying to make this trailer reminiscent of the infamous trailer for the live action Sonic movie, I'll need to make sure the music choice I go with is the least fitting song possible given the IP my theoretical film is based on. (preferably something released before or around 2019 as a reference to the live action Sonic movie's original release date)
Before I actually took this screenshot, I ended up finding the perfect song choice for this particular trailer:
that's right, instead of Gangster's Paradise by Coolio, I'm going with Toxic by Britney Spears. (well, they both make about as much sense as each other)
I'm choosing this because I don't think I could find a more inappropriate song to place in a trailer for a Hollywood adaptation of this guy:
Now that the soundtrack has been worked out, it's time to start the animatic itself. I'll be evidencing this via cropped screencaps using the snipping tool because I think it'll be easier in the long run, so without further ado, let's begin. (I'll also be going into each feature of the software since things may get a little bit complicated)
So from what I can gather, OpenToonz starts off by asking you to create a scene for a new project (in this case, the project is called "Bitris 16 Trailer Animatic" while the scene is called "Bitris 16_Trailer 1"), essentially, think of it like how Dreams PS4/5 lets you make scenes that go towards a larger "Dream"
An example would come from a piece of experimentation I did involving Hugo The Shape-Shifter:
By the way, the background can be anything you want it to be (even a newly made drawing), it doesn't have to be this Japanese frame sheet I found via a video tutorial
You see those coloured boxes off to the right side of the screen? Well those colours actually correspond to all the colours that you wish to assign a particular layer. (in this case, I'm currently assigning the background layer a transparent colour, black and grey) This can actually be quite helpful for making sure the exact same colours are used on each frame of the animation since if you vary the shades even a little bit, it'll make it seem like the character is flickering, which 9 times out of 10 isn't intentional.
Returning to the brief Hugo animation I made for a moment, we can see that I've given his layer a total of six colours, those being two blacks (one black for the outline and the other, slightly lighter black, for the inside of his mouth and his pupils), one white (for his teeth and the whites of his eyes), one transparent (because that one already exists), one brown (for his main body), one light blue (for his face, hands and feet) and one red. (for his tongue) This also allows me to change the colour scheme on the fly if I don't like the way a particular colour scheme looks without having to re-do the whole animation, so Hugo could go from his usual colour scheme to something like this:
I can even re-render the animation like this if I wanted to, so I did:
Because of the fact that this is an animatic and not just a storyboard, I have to make the art quickly but I still need to have some regard for depth since this is closer to the finalised visuals, so I still need to do things like erase the unneeded lines.
Not much to say here really, just wanted to show that.
Getting back to the important stuff, I also need to fill in all the layers so that things don't get confusing later on with all the lines cluttering up the frame.
For this screen-shot, you're probably wondering what's going on with Kyoto's arm (particularly the one closer to the foreground), as for some reason I've felt the need to split it into two separate layers. Well you see, that's because the layer that Kyoto's main body is on (which I've labelled as "Kyoto_Body") is below the layer I drew the desk on, and as such if I were to draw her entire arm at once, part of it would be obscured by the white filling of the desk layer.
To solve this, I decided to make the part of Kyoto's arm that needs to reach over the desk a separate layer of it's own that would go above the desk layer to ensure you'd actually be able to see both her arms while she's typing stuff on her computer in order to complete her accounting tasks. Of course, doing this presented an entirely separate problem of how I was going to fill it in without accidentally covering the entire screen. That's actually where this grey line comes in (which I only made grey after drawing so that you could actually see it), as this will cover the entire width of the arm, thus allowing me to fill the whole thing in without any trouble and when I eventually do, it will look like she's whole.
Going on to an unrelated topic for a moment, I can't just have Britney Spear's Toxic playing throughout the whole trailer, so before that song comes on, I'm choosing to have the instrumental for the song "El Tren" (the 80s version) by Teresa Rabal:
The trouble is, I only want the instrumental and not the lyrics but there's no clean instrumental out there of the original for me to steal, so what's a man like me to do, steal a karaoke version instead? Nah, instead I'm going to use the power of free AI tools
It's called Vocalremover.org if you're curious.
What this allows me to do is take any local music file stored on my PC and use the AI tools (be it mere vocal removal or even splitting it into stems) to remove certain parts of the audio while leaving the rest. (admittedly to mixed results depending on the song, but at least it's free) Thus allowing me to get a mostly clean instrumental of the song. (although for the purposes of the trailer, it's good enough)
To import audio into OpenToonZ, all you have to do is drag the file from the file explorer into the project timeline and new layer will automatically be created for it, although to do MP3's, you'll need to have FFMPEG installed on your machine and you'll need to tell OpenToonZ where you put it on your PC/Mac/Linux machine (here's a helpful link to the official website if you don't already have it: http://ffmpeg.org/ (Don't worry, there's also a tutorial for handling letting OpenToonZ know where FFMPEG is, but it's mainly for Windows users), and even then, unlike Dreams where inserting and editing audio is quick and painless, here, actually editing it into place and cutting parts out can prove quite difficult if you don't know what you're doing (much like me right now, but lucky I got there in the end), so it's probably best to only use audio as a reference to sync up your footage and then add in the audio in editing later on (which for me, is where Shotcut comes in) so that you can do more than cut and move it. By the way, from next week onwards, expect things to slow to even more of a crawl than it already is, so I may have to go back to doing minor production updates like I did when working on Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development. (so consider this mission failed for now)
For those of you that don't know, "onion skinning" is where you get to use a ghost version of the previous frame as a point of reference when drawing the next one, this is helpful for keeping your characters looking consistent throughout the animation process, as when it comes to my drawings, things like ears, heads, eyes and hands tend to change size a lot:
I think the reason it's even called onion skinning is because back in the days of cel animation (which is where you physically draw the characters onto special transparent sheets called "celluloid"), because of the transparent nature of the celluloid being used, an animator could layer one cel on top of another in order to make sure that both frames were consistent with one another, and like a certain green ogre once said to a talking donkey "onions have layers." (I bet whoever named the concept was hungry for onions)
I'm Afraid I Have Some Bad News Gang
I've done some thinking about the entire Super Sheep in Holly-weird Hyjinks saga and ended up realising something. Much like what happened with Super Sheep in Hex-o's Exos, I'm starting to think that the entire saga would have a little bit more of an impact on the audience if they were actually familiar with the main cast and their typical dynamic beforehand.
The thing is, in all the appearances that the Super Sheep cast have had thus far, I never actually animated what a proto-typical Super Sheep episode would even be. The closest I got was Super Sheep in Convention F-3 but even then, Hex Moother wasn't in it because he simply wasn't needed for the story I wanted to tell. (I'll probably still animate the more Looney Tunes-esque cartoons since I did enjoy animating Convention F-3)
As such, I've decided that I'll need to re-re-boot this project once again (meaning the current story will be thrown out for the time being), this time I'll go ahead and make something that will actually introduce The Justice Trio (or perhaps even The Justice Quartet, as I'm also thinking of having Lorange just be alive and kicking since I can potentially get a good character dynamic going if Super Sheep and friends were a quartet rather than a trio) and Hex Moother's dynamic. (and while I'm at it, I could also introduce Steve Washington and even the Bollen Super Hero Agency into the mix too if I play my cards right)
Looks like it's back to the drawing board folks.
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