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Cookie and Patsy finally together in our Tough Cookie style!

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Character designing on our tablet today!

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If I was looking for someone to turn my story into an animated short, (I took a lot out of this because I thought it sounded stupid.) How much roughly would it cost to have an animator help turn these ideas into something more?

Thanks for your questions! It’s hard to give an exact numbers as there are so many factors and variables; the quality of animation, the technique, the duration, the complexity etc. It’s a long list so it’s hard to give an amount without seeing a detailed brief.

Be prepared to spend though, animation isn’t cheap when fairly priced as there’s a lot of labour involved. If you’re looking for more info feel free to message us!

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this looks awesome, what are your timelines looking like right now?

Thanks for your question! Our ideal scenario would be having a complete 10 minute pilot by March 2017. We both currently have full time animation jobs, so will be working on it during evenings and weekends, which we know from experience is tough. But, we’ve had over a year of planning and prep so are ready to just get on with the labour-insensive animation stage. People have offered to help out which is amazing, so we are confident we will meet that deadline.

In terms of mini-deadlines, expect a lot of concept art and animation tests this coming month.

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Is your series going to be voiced at all, or more of a Tom and Jerry kind of show with limited voice?

Hey, thanks for the question! The show will have dialogue because there will be drama and plot to get through. But the animation style will be lively and fun with extended action sequences. We will be experimenting with scenes that use minimum to no dialogue as it can be powerful when used correctly. Breaking Bad does it very well. Less is sometimes more, as they say. :)

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So now we've had a chance to experiment, we're really happy to show a short test of how we want Tough Cookie to look visually. It also introduces Patsy, one of our main characters. The background was made with Paint Tool SAI and will be the level of detail we will aim for with all backgrounds in the pilot episode. There's subtle texture here and there and we like the bold shapes and off-kilter lines. Our characters will have a thin black outline instead of the thicker style we've played around with previously. It saves time in the clean up stage and, with only two animators, that's a huge win. Our biggest time saver though will be switching from using Flash to Toon Boom Harmony which will be the topic of a future post. As daunting as the learning curve was, Toon Boom is the superior software for what we need. Things are finally happening!

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ANIMATION BEGINS

The Tough Cookie pilot episode is written and production is ah-go! Our main cast has been designed and we are now playing around with the style of animation before we fully storyboard the episode. 

The run cycle above is the first time we’ve seen Cookie in motion, so we’re really excited! This test is done with Flash but we are considering using Toon Boom for actual animation because you can deconstruct and separate your drawings more easily for compositing and After Effects work. 

What we like about this test is the perspective and arcs. Because Tough Cookie will be an action series, we'll be really focusing on interesting camera work and perspective instead of the usual flat shots.

We’ll be doing in-depth updates here on Tumblr and snippets of our process on Vine! 

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Tough Cookie: Episode One - Coming Soon!

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New and shiny art supplies got here just in time for our brainstorm session! Details and sneak peeks of our latest project coming soon! Stay tuned folks!

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Hair Despair

Take a look at some concept designs for the short! We wanted to make the final 3D environment as close to these off-kilter jazzy drawings as possible. It sure was fun to do!

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Hair Despair

This is our first time working on a project together and we're very proud of it. It mixes a 2D Flash character and a 3D Maya character in a fun retro style world. Month of hard work went into the technical side of this, and it was worth every second. Check it out!

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Oh hey, it's you! Welcome to the BEEBOG Animation Tumblr! Sure is pretty, ain't it?

Tumblr is an amazing place for artists so we shall be using it a lot to showcase behind the scenes type jazz. Feel free to follow us, and we might follow you if you're a creative creature too!

www.beebog.co.uk