When we first started talking about creating another bumper for the MyToons contest, it was literally a crazy thought because we only had two days to do it. But the more we talked about it, the more we wanted to go for it. Even if we didn’t finish it in time for the contest, we were going to finish and submit it anyway. We had an awesome idea in mind with a great message in it, and we just wanted to share that.
Yes way! Okay so this may sound insane, but we decided to attempt creating a second bumper with the remaining days left until the deadline. That left us with only two days to create the bumper from start to finish.
Since we had already submitted ‘Everything Animated’, this second bumper wasn’t so much about trying to come up with a super creative idea. In fact, the idea came to us prior to even deciding to go for it. We’ve been receiving massive amounts of positive feedback on our ‘Everything Animated’ submission, and the sheer love and support from the incredibly talented people in the MyToons community has been overwhelming! That’s what inspired this second bumper.
The idea behind this one is based off of the actual community of MyToons. Everyone is incredibly nice and there is so much talent, it’s a massive inspiration just being there! Once we were able to check out other people’s submissions to the bumper contest, it was not only inspiring to see, but fascinating how diverse the art and animations styles were. How cool would it be if there was a project with all of these diverse art and animation styles, combined into a single scene? That’s what this bumper (that we’re calling ‘Community’) is all about.
With the length of time that we had to finish this, we unfortunately couldn’t reach out to other artists and animators to have them contribute, so we made it a little in-house experiment. Normally we would conform our artwork to fit a single style, but in this project we wanted everyone’s artwork raw and specific to their own style.
As soon as we had the concept down in our minds, we got started working on it immediately. We knew that it was a VERY long shot of us getting this done in time, but we took the chance anyway. We started around 1:00 pm (PST) on February 26th, 2008 and ended up finishing (and submitting) it at exactly 8:02 am (PST) on February 28th, 2008. The competition deadline was at 11:59am (CST), which was like 8:59 am for us. So in other words, we managed to finish and submit it with only 57 minutes to spare.
This one runs about 21 seconds, and it has a wide variety of characters from cartoons that we currently have in the works, combined with the 60+ random character designs that we came up with when we first started. We’ll be sure to tell you more about the development process in the future.
Our MyToons bumper is complete and submitted with only a few days to spare… whew! And it weighed in at exactly… 29 seconds… WHEW! So far it has gotten some great reviews.
You can check it out right here:
In order to speed up production time, we needed more help. So we enlisted the creative minds of not only our sister (who created all of the sparkly special effects that you’ll see in the bumper), but our parents as well. We’ve definitely gotten our creative genes from our parents (who were both artists growing up), so we can’t thank them enough for all of the support that they have given us. Even going out of their way to put pencil to paper and help design the toys found in the room. Our mom even pulled our her old musical talents by helping us produce the official music!
We can truly say that without our sister and parents pitching in their time and efforts, we most certainly would not have made the deadline. A million thanks to them and thanks to everyone who has commented on our submission at MyToons! You flatter us!
The new episode of 2nd Avenue is coming along nicely! While production continues to move forward, the episodes is unfortunately still a long ways from completion. So, in the meantime we decided share a few images from the latest episode, as well as introduce two new character who will be making their debut!
In December 2007, we heard about a website called MyToons via the Cold Hard Flash website. The article was about a commercial bumper competition that was being hosted at MyToons. A commercial bumper (or break bumper) is a brief transition announcement that is usually placed between the television program and the actual commercials. The rules are simple: The bumper must be under 30 seconds, and it must contain the MyToons Logo.
We decided that we would enter this competition if we could fit it into our work schedule. At the time, we were knee-deep in the production of the My Neighborhood Pilot, so we were definitely unable to start immediately, but we did begin brainstorming about what our bumper would consist of. Coming up with an idea turned out to be way harder than we expected. In fact, we couldn’t come up with any ideas at all…
We were constantly asking ourselves, “what could our bumper be about?” We’ve never created something like this before and it was difficult for us to come up with an idea that we can show in 30 seconds or less. This was new territory for us, so it was very difficult for us to imagine anything. After spending so much time trying to come up with an idea that we felt could work, we eventually looked at ourselves and had a mind-blowing realization: WE were the idea!
In other words, we decided to use our frustrating situation to our advantage by simply making a bumper about us trying to come up with an idea for a bumper. Does that make sense? Basically the kid that’s starring in our bumper will be a reflection of ourselves, and he will go through similar frustrations of trying to come up with an idea. We’ll make his world black & white to represent his lack of any vibrant or colorful ideas. We will then combine that concept with MyToons’s slogan (“Everything Animated”) and have our bumper end with his failed ideas literally coming to life by coloring/animating everything in his room. Hence, everything animated.
We’re still in the process of developing this bumper, and so far it runs about 25 seconds long. There are still shots to be completed so we’re cutting it close to the 30 second limit. But hopefully it won’t get much longer after all of the animation is finished.
The competition ends February 28th 2008. The original deadline was January 18th 2008 , but they decided to extend it… lucky us!