Behind the Scenes of Flushed Away

So I'm sitting here typing out the Behind the Scenes article for my latest animation, Flushed Away, but can't seem to think of a good origin story. I guess my mind is just a complicated mess that thinks up of weird stuff like Flushed Away.

Okay I thought of a bit of an origin story. So for the past two weeks I've been working on a 45 second animation for the Stratford Festival, and during that time I wasn't working on any personal projects, save for a bit of pre-production here and there. The project was completed on April 4th, at which point my YouTube channel had been stale since Stan's Secret. Because of this, I decided to release something soon. Luckily a 4 day weekend was coming up for Easter, which gave me a lot of time to make something short. One idea led to another, and voila, the idea for Flushed Away was conceived. Two kids are in the sewers and one of them jumps in to get some Easter eggs/poop. My videos really tug at your heartstrings, don't they?

Taking advantage of a piece of glass I hoarded (just knowing it'd come in use), I threw a bunch of translucent green bricks so that lights could go underneath and illuminate the sewage. The sewer walls were built around this, and then supports were added underneath so that the whole sewer was elevated. I used small handheld lights for some shots, and an actual lamp positioned underneath the glass for others.

Alright, what else was interesting about this production? Ohh, I guess using a Joby tripod for the whole thing was kind of different? I use a regular sized tripod with pretty much all of my videos made with my brand spankin' new Canon Rebel T3i. It's kind of inconvenient, because I generally have to reach over the camera to animate as a result of how my studio is set up. Since the whole set for Flushed Away was raised, I just used the mini Joby tripod so that my camera could actually be on the desk and I'd have direct access to the characters. Isn't that just the most fascinating thing ever?

The voices were recorded in post-production (which I do not recommend), but I didn't feel it was necessary to record beforehand. Basically I just wanted to animate and didn't care about the voice acting until the very end. Rad.

Getting kinda bored of this writeup. Here's a picture.

Okay I'm going. Hey look at how small that bathroom set reall was! woah.