Smashbits #28: "TV Pilot" - Intergalactic Pizza Delivery Guy Ep 2

Meant to put this up on Monday but I'm still a little out of sync with the world after being in so deep with this project for 2 months, whoops!

This is probably my favorite of the episodes, because it's the most emotional set of storylines, and also because I was under the least stress with the deadline for this act of the pilot.  In case you're curious, since the original ten 3-minute-episodes ended up getting edited together a little weird, Part 2 consists of episodes 101 (the opening flashback) and 105-107.

The drama for this one is relatively simple.  This was at the point where I had been forced, due to their own negligence, to give up my original high-budget agreement, and just do faces and a handful of fixes for half the budget.  Throughout this stage of the project, even though I was ahead of my deadline, Smashbits' representatives would not trust me and kept insisting that I was gonna be late and trying to take episodes back from my order so that they could cut my budget more, without communicating any reason the deadlines may be different than on my original agreement.  Then they just went ahead and assigned faces for episodes 106 and 108 to their in-house team without telling me (they did suggest doing that weeks in advance, but again, they didn't ask before they went ahead and did it, I had been committing to doing it all) and I was forced to drop another quarter of what was left of my budget.  It kinda killed my mood for the project after this, but it did make this episode's deadline easier and I do feel like this was the most I enjoyed drawing faces.  I made myself invested in Frank's relationships with Pablo, Sean and Frank's dad.

Here's a lighter story:  Frank's dad was one of a handful of characters who were going to be up to me to design in my original agreement.  Although he is shown to be Frank's biological human father here (and in an early concept I found, named erroneously"Farnk's Dad," which is his name in my mind), I was originally told Farnk Dad could be imagined as an adoptive alien dad instead of I wanted.  I hope I remember to post my small handful of attempts I made to design a weird alien dad before this project killed me..

Anyway, I think that sums up the production of this one...  Enjoy the faces!  I also did that crazy shot where Pablo crashes the ship and the camera zooms in.