Once a script and/or scratch track are underway we typically take some time to scribble out our ideas. The goal of all this scribbling is never to make ‘beautiful Art’ but to help us figure out the best and funniest ways to communicate an idea or get a gag across. The storyboards are also refered to as thumbnails because a lot of times that’s how big the drawing are – the size of your thumbnail! These are done by our good friend and go-to funny guy Josh ‘the Wolf’ Tulman as well as a couple by our buddy Alex Hirsch…

An animatic is the very, very rough file that lets us start to see how some of our ideas will play out with the music. Normally we try to get a locked down animatic before we begin production but for this project we just dove right into making stuff as inspiration struck. Here’s a version of the animatic from 12/7/09 when a bunch of ideas were already locked. The red scenes were still up in the air at the time…

Finally, here is a Color Key for the film. This gives us a sense for the over all ‘feel’ and mood of the piece and lets us see how one scene flows into the next. Again, in a normal production this would be done up front before any animation is produced but for this project we just started making stuff and then it wasn’t until halfway through production that we started to concern ourselves with how we would pull it all together…