Hellooo Neighbor! Here's a parody I was assigned, it was written and voiced by Dexter Manning (who you'll probably recognize as Jesse from my Minecraft videos), and is based on a game called Hello Neighbor about you moving into a new house across the street from a neighbor character who is programmed with artificial intelligence that allows him to outsmart and catch the player. It was very hard to find consistent information about the game's designs because it seems like the game is still in development and changes in each new iteration, so I tried to make this just feel like its own new iteration with a few details from different versions. It features my attempt at a new style that is a little more stop-motion inspired and allows me to focus on putting funny faces on what are essentially puppet bodies. I hope you enjoy!
Hoooo boy, so this production backstory may be a bit confusing: Of the projects I am about to release over the coming weekends, this is the one that I started first... but it is also the last one I finished. To some extent those delays are to be expected... it is the length of a full TV cartoon, an experiment in a new style, and a Youtube cartoon that would obviously be lower priority than the Disney work I've already announced.
This animatic was completed on April 18, meaning I started this around the middle of April, but before long there was word of Smashbits being unable to pay its freelancers, and so it was suggested that I take a break. During that break, I had a creative breakthrough and storyboarded a new Hoop-a-Joop short! Those storyboards will also be shared soon, but are probably my proudest project among this new batch. Anyway, around a month later in May and coincidentally the same week I finished my Hoop boards, I received a call from Smashbits about the Disney project, once again delaying Hello Neighbor. I should also note that Disney was surprisingly low-budget as well, so Hello Neighbor had to be lower priority for budgetary reasons as well. Hello Neighbor went back into production between each Disney project, making the last half of its production kind of a nonsensical blur for me, haha. It was meant to be finished at the end of June, but was delayed until Tuesday of this week, so... early-mid August. But it's finally done and I'm starting to move onto easier projects! I was hoping they would post the Youtube version yesterday but apparently they had another video in the pipeline, so I'll just upload the animatic and my copy of the full animation today! Hope you all had good weekends. :)