SexuaLobster
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Sentient Hat (unreleased 2008 cartoon)
🕑 Added 2024-02-25 13:06:11 +0000 UTCA deadbeat meets a genius hat.
The year was 2008. I had just finished making a series called Angry Dog for a company called Aniboom. They had an interest in acquiring series ideas and pitching them as TV shows. I pitched this idea to them near the end of their spending spree. Unlike Angry Dog, this one was never released.
I was reminded of it because I need sounds of someone walking in thongs (or flipflops) for Gazza of Penrith and I remembered I'd made some for this project. I hadn't seen it for over 10 years and couldn't remember it well. It's not that bad, lots of unforced mistakes, minimal animation, low energy music, weird colours, bad performance from me and my girlfriend voices 3 separate characters (I didn't know any other women well enough to ask). I didn't phone it in, at the time this was the best I could do.
I think it's ok for me to upload it for you guys to watch if you're interested. I don't own it and although I am a little tempted to upload it publicly (there's a pretty good chance that the people that bought this have completely forgotten about it. I don't even have their e-mail address anymore) I'd want to change some aspects of it and I don't know if it's worth it. The title painting is by Peter Yong.
Comments
SexuaLobster
For my solo efforts, I find if I force it, what I write is usually pretty mid. If I wait and type out little ideas here and there as they occur I'm more likely to get something good. But as a result I'm not very prolific. I don't know how I'd go if I had to write a lot, like tv show episodes, which is one reason I haven't tried very hard to sell a show (I've tried a little bit but I give up easy). I like to look at unfinished ideas years later when I've forgotten them a little, sometimes it's really obvious what should happen or what I should change. This cartoon is so old I don't remember how I went about writing it.
Nick Allott
What techniques do you use to come up with story ideas? Your comic and song collabs created many interesting ideas. Is there anything else you use when writing solo?
Lurker45
That gag about his head bleeding when asked to take off his hat was pretty good.
SexuaLobster
No I never saw The Head! MTV had some good cartoons back in the day.
keyboard_zealot
Have you ever seen the MTV show "The Head"? It had a somewhat similar theme: an alien living in a guy's head and helping him out. Anyways this is funny stuff, especially the part "I'm sorry but my head bleeds whenever someone asks me to take my hat off" tickles my funny bone for some reason. Too bad it wasn't released back then and seems to be tied up in ownership limbo
SexuaLobster
I think this was my first project that had half decent sound. The Angry Dog series before this one had dreadful sound because on newgrounds file size was still a big issue so I uploaded with low kbps, people used to neg me if my file size was large, and for some reason Aniboom re encoded the episodes and mashed the sound, so no one heard it in 44k 16bit. Always liked the purple and green combo. I also reuse a visual joke with the bird strike at the end, virtually the same thing is in a Fernando cartoon 6 years later, I don't even know if I did it consciously or not.
DWC
His purple shirt and tie when he was a groin surgeon instantly reminded me of Gooseman. Neat stuff. Even though you say this isn't your best stuff or anything, like I mentioned before, it impresses me just how professional you've been from the beginning. Although it's obvious that you've improved over time, your bar, especially for audio quality, was particularly high. Typically if you look at older videos from the same era you can easily tell they didn't have good mics or understanding of audio mixing and such (of course that's not everyone, but just in general). It's very interesting to see old cartoons. Preservation of history is nice too.
