Smashbits #27: "TV Pilot" - Intergalactic Pizza Delivery Guy Ep 1

Once again, I'm crawling back out of the shadows with something Smashbits begged me to be a part of!  This one was ROUGH and I'm gonna tell you the gritty details, but if nothing else, I'm proud to say this is at least one of the LONGEST animations I've ever been a part of.  That said, it consumed every waking moment of the past 2 months that wasn't already occupied by my dayjob, and I had to spend all of Saturday (almost 22 hrs) animating to get the last part done by the deadline.

The Details:

INTERGALACTIC PIZZA DELIVERY GUY ("IPDG" and "Pizza Guy" for short) was picked up by Octopie as a web series to be animated by Smashbits and potentially be pitched as a proof-of-concept pilot to networks like Adult Swim.  It is the "beloved" pet project of Dexter Manning, who I previously collaborated with on Smashbits' Minecraft Story Mode and Hello Neighbor parodies, two of their most viewed videos, as well as an Overwatch parody I jumped ship on.  This "Original Cartoon" is based heavily on his most popular project with Smashbits, If Undertale Was Realistic, using the same voices and basic roles of the characters from Undertale, as well as the first letters of their names.

The Backstory:

Smashbit started this project 8 MONTHS AGO, deciding not to bring me in, even though I did their other TV project and have worked with Dexter's cringe-comedy material before.   No, they put a whole underpaid in-house team on this, and nobody liked the cartoon so it all came back looking lifeless and boring.  Needless to say, Dexter and Octopie were disappointed that this was their best effort.  2 MONTHS AGO, they spent a whole day trying to get me on the phone, even though I protested I was too busy. They promised a huge budget, that half the project was already done and the characters were already modeled, leading me to believe this could be as simple as my Hello Neighbor short. 

Unfortunately, it turned out they animated it all in the latest version of Flash, and I have used the same ancient version since 2004.  So I was immediately faced with numerous issues getting the new program up to date and making all the Flash files work.  This cartoon is currently being released as 3 roughly 10-minute episodes, but it was originally 10 3-minute episodes that were deemed too boring on their own, and are now awkwardly stitched together.  I worked on these by every 3-minute section, and each one was broken down into 5-7 files. Out of the 10 eps, I worked on 101-105, 107, 109-10, making that like 50 files to keep track of. 

So I immediately fell behind because they didn't realize how much work they were asking me to do, and we had to downsize me to just tweaking details and fixing certain faces in eps 101-103, and then animating pretty much nothing BUT the faces for the rest of my eps, and some small scene fixes, while Smashbits finished animating the rest of the episodes.  This was still incredibly boring to sit through, endlessly looping the terrible dialogue and scratch audio, and ended up not being much relief on me at all.  Still, they repeatedly cut my budget due to this, making it much less than I wanted to be paid for all this time. I hated it and I'm glad it's over.

That's all I can remember to say right now that I was directly involved in.  I'll post Part 2 next week with anything else I can think of-- it'll have more of my faces, and has some more interesting  developments than this episode.   In case you're curious, since the 10 episodes ended up getting edited together a little weird, Part 1 consists of episodes 102-104.  The last scene of episode 101 was converted into the "first day" scene in this episode.

Something that wasn't my fault:  THE WEIRD LIGHTING EFFECT ON EVERYONE.  I don't know why they thought that should be a thing, it's really distracting from the faces, I think.  It makes me really confused about what's wrong with the light source on this story's planet.