Rabbits, basketball and Rick

Speaking of unfinished projects, here’s one I started back in the early 1990′s. Hand drawn on blank index cards, the animated adventures of the Keene family came to life. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

The story is about three children who turn into monsters, literally, after drinking sour milk given to them by their mother, who doesn’t realize the expiration date was several years ago. Based on a family in my old neighborhood that I spent years and years getting to know, it is totally believable, if you accept my firsthand account, that there would be moldy items in their refrigerator. I admit to some minor embellishments in the storyline.

And then the production died just as the third act was beginning, leaving a poor, troubled family in a state of “suspended animation” for the last 15 years or so. NOW, who’s the monster?

I never had a plan as to the direction of the story. No script, no storyboards. Just me, my imagination and some colored pencils. I definitely got the cartoon off to a good start whereby a boiling point was reached, but the third act never saw the light of day for a few reasons.

Mostly, at the time, I was thinking of the conclusion on a much larger scale while being confined to the borders of a 3 x 5 index card. This alone was depressing and reason to stop working and start rethinking things.

Secondly, without a computer, I was dependent upon an arcane way of capturing each cell on video and somehow planning on stitching them all together.. in-camera? All 1,377 of them?

Lastly, I had spent so much of my life drawing frames (a process that included pencil sketch, ink outline and adding life with colored pencils) that by the time I reached my breaking point, it was very easy to take a brief hiatus, due to exhaustion and my struggle to handle the monotony. I just never returned to the project.

This past weekend, it occurred to me that I COULD finish the cartoon if I used CG animation. But not just finish it, because I think it would be lame to go from handdrawn animation cells and then morph into CG objects. I could recreate everything from scratch and tell that story using the current cells as my storyboard.

Makes total sense.

I modeled a “Rick”, downloaded a basketball stadium from the www and started to visualize my intro, straying from the original idea and adding a rabbit with some mad ball skillz! The rabbit is a new design stolen from the Christmas Spectacular Animated Adventure (more on that later, much.. much.. MUCH later).

So this is the first sequence I’m going to animate and post as a standalone, as well as a test to see if I actually want to continue the entire production. If I like it and decide to move forward, it will be included as the intro to the whole animation, as was originally conceived.

Most importantly, I need to start animating again and produce something. This project is perfect because it includes three things that really interest me: rabbits, basketball and paying tribute to my friend Rick.

Stay tuned..