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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@starshipqstar
Our animated queer scifi comedy series is out now!
All the animated episodes are out now everyone!! 😭🥳
Please like/share/comment on the YouTube videos! We’re part of an initiative where 3/10 teams will get to make a full pilot and potentially a series - so supporting the video really helps!
trying this new thing! each week I'm going to share what I'm listening to - not a review or rating, just a peak into what I'm trying out and what works about it (I'll never share anything that I've listened to and haven't liked).
and I'm always taking recs!
this week - @camlannpod and "Ask Your Father". descriptions in the image description!
Camlann ❤️
Tweet by Heather Hogan:
Straight friend: Will you sensitivity read my book for my lesbian best friend character?
Me, two weeks later: The lesbian best friend is absolutely perfect. Here's 16 pages of notes detailing the incorrect things you said about Star Trek.
5:32 PM on 2/25/24
(I have done this EXACT thing but for a script)
its so scary to put yourself out there but a SINGLE message saying "hi i loved what you made it touched me in some way" makes it all worth it 10000%
daily reminder that if you like something someone made tell! them! tell them tell them tell them TELL THEM
✨THEM✨
History will say they were Co-Captains...
WATCH | LISTEN | INFO
Podcast Cover Art Illustration vs Animation Character Design
From their original design on the cover art of our fiction podcast - all the characters were changed a bit for animation!
This was mostly due to needing to simplify the characters to make them easier to animate (aka replicate over and over), but also have the opportunity for a few adjustments to suit their characters.
AURELIA
Aurelia is the most similar to her cover art illustration
Her uniform is looser, with sleeves rolled up - to reflect her more relaxed/chaotic character
SIM
On the other hand - Sim’s uniform is tight and perfectly pressed! Much like her.
We felt Sim needed different hair - something neater like her uniform, and also more gay…
Now all the characters have legs - you can also see that Sim is a short king!
Who knew how hot Sim was?!?!
MO
We needed to simplify Mo’s hair, uniform and remove the necklace
Also looking more gay now with the helix and tat! ☺️
Mo’s armpit hair matches her blue hair 😂
(In hindsight I wish we ditched the tat - because it was a detail that often got missed by the animators - so we had to add it in frame by frame in a lot of shots!)
SOLARIS
Very similar!
You can see the head to body ratio is different here, as all the animated characters have heads larger than normal
DUSTY
Flight jacket to represent the pilot skillz
Butched her up a bit more
New hair 🥵
BOB
Very similar
Now with cute lil paunch
Our animators all loved sweet Bobby and were committed to “baby girlifying him”
Watch them all in action here (you can watch in any order!):
Episode 1 (Sim & Aurelia)
Episode 2 (Mo & Solaris)
Episode 3 (Bob & Dusty)
Oh my gosh we are so so close to 50%!! Is there any chance we can get there in our last 8 hours? 💖💖💖
We made it to 50%!! Just two hours left on crowdfunding left for y’all to pick up any more goodies your heart may desire ❤️
When the real ✨art✨ is outside the frame
When you’re doing hand drawn frame-by-frame animation - you don’t need to draw thing that won’t end up in the final frame. But zoom out from the shot posted above, and you end up with beautiful shots like this 😂
Bob’s faces are truly a mood
Writers suffer from tinker bell brain they need constant applause or they start believing everything they’ve written is horseshit
On a supportive queer fandom, community, and making our first ever animation
Making the Starship Q Star animation has largely been wonderful - we got to make a show we love and learnt a LOT. As two writers new to producing the format (Lauren had only written for kids animation) - it was a huge learning curve. A learning cliff if you will. Whilst we had to cut a lot out for time and budget, we're really proud of how they turned out within the constraints. And by the end? Lauren and I coloured most of the final episode and I did all the compositing and VFX myself (all in Toon Boom Harmony - a program neither of us had used a few months before).
Animation is also still a bit of a boys club - so we committed to finding a design and animation team that was diverse as possible, and reflected what the project was about. I'm proud to say that we managed that (out of our cast & crew of 24, only 3 were cis-men - and most were queer). We also gave opportunities to diverse creatives who hadn't had jobs in the industry before - and have since seen some of them use the experience to get more paid work. You simply love to see it! All of the cast and crew are incredibly special and brought amazing things to the show - an absolute dream team.
It hasn't been easy at all - animation is a LOT of work, and the budget didn't allow for all the support we probably needed, so it was months of unpaid work for the two if us, and a number of weeks working 15-20 hour days to get it done. But we bloody well did it!
But since the show has been out, it's been a bit of a... reality check? Having been immersed in the audio drama community with Starship thus far - we perhaps got a little too used to how incredible supportive (and perhaps queer?) everyone is.
Another animation project is part of the same initiative as we are, and it was one of the first projects released. The creator is a really lovely and talented guy who has made a special show we really enjoyed. His show went kind of viral - which is AWESOME! It's great! However due to his experience on certain other projects... some of the fans of his show... aren't necessarily our audience? And the nature of the initiative means only some projects get chosen to make more.
The first comment on YouTube a few minutes after the Ep 1 of Starship Q Star was published was "make more [the other show]". Then our socials started getting homophobic and really negative comments (and trust me I have spent a long time curating that tiktok algorithm lol). At first I thought it was weird or maybe it was just because we were being shared by a third party so the wrong audience were finding us - but then they also included comments like "[the other show] is better".
I honestly find it odd that some fans take it upon themselves to do stuff like this. Making art is hard! And liking one thing better than something else doesn't mean you have to actively hate that something else! There's room for us all to succeed (well, once we take care of that pesky thing called capitalism). And maybe remember that when it's an indie project the people who made the thing are usually the ones running the socials lol.
We are so grateful to have had so many incredible people love and champion the show in both audio and animated format. And we feel so lucky to be a part of both the queer and audio drama community (yes I know that venn diagram is a circle) - it truly is such a special supportive environment that lifts one other up.
Anyway, I'll probably delete this (way too earnest - eww) but thanks to all the lovely ones out there. We really love and appreciate all of you and all the nice comments and messages and shares. Means the world!
Forever in love with these two backgrounds done by our designers Kate Moon & Nitara Nowrungsah!! They feature in Episode 3 where Bob and Dusty head to an alien planet
Both based in Melbourne, Australia like us! Kate was the designer for our podcast cover art and is also the sister of VA Lena Moon who plays Mo! Kate is also an incredible character designer and has both worked in animation as well as illustrated award winning books and animations. The incredible designs of our six main characters? That’s all Kate 😍.
Nitara is the absolute sweetest but will also design some twisted and weird things if you let her! We were super lucky to have her in between her work on Hazbin Hotel (!!) and Helluva Boss and she designed a huge breadth of things for us and smashed it out of the park each time!
Can’t wait to show you more of their incredible work on the show in just. A. Few. Days!!!
The animation is pretty gay everyone… NEXT WEEK!
Animation process!
Director Thumbs
After we finalised the script, recorded it with the actors and locked the dialogue edit - it was time for Lauren to do her Director thumbnails! This is to roughly plan out the way the storyboard will play out and give a hint to expressions and character acting.
Storyboards
Then comes the storyboards! Edited together in an animatic, they are much more detailed in terms of shots, character movement, and expressions - and work as the guide for the animators. At this stage we also made cuts for length and story, as every second counts once you get into frame by frame animation!
Rough Animation
Rough animation focuses on key frames and strong poses, and making sure the characters are on model. It’s best to make sure everything is correct at this stage as you move into —
Clean and Colour Animation!
Backgrounds are dropped in, clean lines are drawn over the roughs, in-between frames are added - and colour is applied!
There’s still a few morse steps like the final sound design, compositing and editing - but amazing to see the progress! Every artist adds their own special touch and it’s such a joy to see it 🥰💞
Solaris and Mo from Starship Q Star: Animated!
Teen genius Solaris knows everything… except how to get it their fist date. Luckily they have the ship’s lothario Medical Officer Mo to guide them through their first first contact…
Mo quickly became the #1 crush of our very queer storyboard and animation team so it’s super exciting for everyone else to see them come to life! And you’ll get to find out where else Mo’s hair is blue…
Starshipqstar.com
Starship Q Star: Animated - Bob & Dusty
Re-introducing Bob and Dusty from Starship Q Star!
Our hapless but sweet botanist Bob and cocky butch pilot Dusty with muscles for days are my fav unlikely best friend duo 💚💚
Can’t wait to share the adventures these two and the rest of the queers get up to early next year!!
starshipqstar.com
Starship Q Star Character Sheets: Aurelia & Sim
There’s so much work that goes in to animation, even when the episodes are only going to be a few minutes!
Each character sheet, made by our character designer Kate Moon, includes both “turn arounds” (seeing the character from different angles), and expression sheets.
This helps the storyboard artist and m animators stay on model and consistent across the episodes. And they are a thing of beauty!
Lauren and I were adamant that Aurelia had to wear her uniform a little loose and crumpled whereas Sim would be perfectly pressed - but all the little character details that Kate put into our little lesbians absolutely exceeded our expectations!
Starshipqstar.com
